Every year for Christmas I give some sort of family history gift to my family members. Well, the last two years, my youngest sister has given ME a family history gift for Christmas. This year, she totally outdid herself!
I present to you my newest treasure – my signature pedigree:
Isn’t that soooooo cool?!
I love it!
My sister said it was pretty tricky to track down all of the signatures. She was reaching out to all sorts of family members to get them and then running them by other family members to make sure it was really the person’s signature and not just the person’s name written by a registrar or other record creator/keeper.
She said the next hardest part was cleaning up the signature so that the background behind it wasn’t distracting. Thankfully her husband, a fashion designer, is a Photoshop master and he was able to help out.
What an incredible, thoughtful, lovely, surprising, and oh-so-perfect gift!
This needs to be a new trend don’t you think?!
And since my awesome sis says there aren’t very many family history gift ideas online or on Pinterest – let’s correct that shall we? I’m adding a new page up there☝🏻 called Family History Gifts. I have a few I have already shared here on my blog, but I’ll work on sharing the details of some others over the next few months. And if you love this awesome creation like I do and want to help spread some good ideas, here is a pinnable image for you:
ps – If you find yourself in need of custom invitations or announcements, you can find my awesome sister here.
pps – I totally blurred/altered mine and my parents’ names and signatures. The actual wall hanging is crisp and lovely.
What a unique and lovely gift
Thank you, Glenna, and thanks for stopping by! ❤️
I just pinned this very lovely signature pedigree. Thank you for sharing!
You are welcome! ❤️
I just fixed the image, I didn’t notice that I saved it in CMYK instead of RGB and it looked awful on Pinterest. Sorry! I’m not sure if it messed up your pin or not, but I deleted the original image. 🙂
What a lovely gift and keepsake. Genealogy talent must run in the family. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for your kind words, Judith! ❤️
I love this idea. What a fun family history item to own. Now I have to go see how many signatures of my own ancestors I can find.
Thank you! I imagine we could probably make signature pedigrees that go back further than portrait pedigrees. ❤️
maybe add signature to the portrait. Put the name to the face so to speak. Lovely gift
Great idea! ❤️
It must be wonderful to have close family members who share your passion for genealogy. Great gift!!
Thank you, Cathy! It really is! She hasn’t been actively researching a lot in the last few years because of the ages of her children, but she really loves genealogy. She did a lot of great work before she was a mother and still pops in on occasion to tidy something up. ❤️
Did I dream it, or have you described this elsewhere, perhaps on Facebook? Anyway, what a beautiful idea. And now I am going to have to check out your Family History Gift page.
Thank you, Amy. And no – you didn’t dream it, haha. I shared it on Facebook very soon after she gave it to me. I just love it so much that I thought it deserved a proper write up. ❤️
Of course!
I love that idea!! What a great surprise
Thank you, Barbara. I love it too! So much. ❤️
I think this is fabulous. HOW did she do it? Did she print out a chart and then put a jpeg of each signature. I’ve been collecting signatures for a couple of years to do this myself, so I’d love any hints on how to create one. Thanks.
Thank you, Jacquie! I’m guessing that she used Adobe Illustrator to create the chart (that’s how she creates all of her custom invitations) and Adobe Photoshop to clean up each signature. Then each signature would have been placed on the chart in Illustrator. If you don’t have those Adobe programs, (they are super pricey!) you could create a very similar chart in a word program or Google docs. It would probably take a little work to figure out how to place each image and have it stay where you want it, but document programs have a lot of tools. I’m sure there are some other ways it could be done though, do you have teenage family members? They could probably tell you five free programs that would work in about 30 seconds. Haha!
HaHa! Your comment about younger family members – so true. Thanks for the information.
Right?! 😂
There has been so much interest in this gift that my sister created a custom listing in her etsy shop for it. I don’t know if this meets your needs, but here is the link – https://www.etsy.com/listing/660490444/the-signature-pedigree-family-history?ref=shop_home_active_1&frs=1
And, she gave me a coupon code for my readers for $5 off – THEGENEALOGYGIRL5 – that is good until February 28th.
(No pressure! I just know that sometimes I would rather pay someone to do certain projects than spend tons of time trying to do them myself. 😉)
I don’t have pictures beyond 2 sets of great grand-parents, so I collect all the signatures I can find of my ancestors and pick the best one to use in lieu of a picture on my tree.
Oh! I love that!! I also cherish signatures, especially of ancestors who lived before cameras. It is their mark on the world. ❤️
Wonderful, creative gift. You’re part of a very talented family.
Thank you, Su!! ❤️
What a terrific idea! I’ll be collecting signatures from now on!
Thank you! My sis is a genius. ❤️ Be sure to share your finished product!!