Family trees are one of the very, very best projects I get to work on as a calligrapher. I don’t approach them the same way a 19th century scribe would have done: not at all! In the same way families have evolved, so should family trees. And while I do offer the kind of family tree that dates back several generations to include your favourite and tenuous links to royalty, the family trees I love most are the more informal, beautifully illustrated ones.
My friend asked me, “Are the family trees you get asked to do requested from very simple families?”
The quick answer: I don’t think so… and I always like to think the way my modern family trees are presented is really inclusive.
Most of my family trees don’t have lines or those clever (complex or baffling, depending on your perspective!) little symbols to indicate marriages, divorce, unmarried partnerships and so on. Because that kind of thing can make family trees super complicated – and the way we look at families now comes from a place of love, which is simpler!
My friend was wondering, “how do you do people who have kids with different people? Or less common I suppose but adopted people who have two different sets of parents?”
The simplest way is to write a family tree with no lines: one with names grouped on the tree, which gives the lovely people who order them full control over where to put everyone! That way, if Sam has 2 children with Molly and 1 child with Joe, we can just group all the names together. And if Mae has 2 adopted parents and 2 birth parents, they can all be included and it doesn’t have to get complicated!
Now the way I see the world, every family is different and frankly, the more different a family structure, the more interesting and wonderful it can be. If you come from a family with an unconventional structure, I would love to help write your family tree.
In the modern family trees I write, names are grouped together based on how YOU see your family. It’s your choice whether you’d like to recognise this on your family tree. If you have one or more step-parents, it’s entirely up to you if you’d like to show this on your family tree or not.
And best of all, the pretty, illustrated family trees which are so popular on my Not On The High St shop have set positions so all you need to do is group names however you’d like to: no lines, no arrows this way and that to indicate how each person is related to the next. You’re all family, after all!
