A fun little crafty project for today....
I found this family genealogy fan chart on Martha Stewart years ago, and immediately loved the idea. (It's the name collector thing rearing it's head again.) Basically, it's just a pretty way of displaying your ancestors--ours starts with Sweet Husband and I, and goes back to our great-great-great grandparents. (I left the "1st generation" to be filled in with Nice Kid later.)
Although, once I really got going, it only took me about fifteen minutes to fill everyone in, I'm disproportionately proud to have it done, as the "planning stage" took me forever. Why so long, you ask?
Reason one: I couldn't decide how to do it. At one time I had the crazy idea of embroidering the whole thing. Then I thought maybe I'd send it off and have a calligrapher do it. Ultimately, I decided I'd better just get going and write it all out myself, because of....
Reason two: While my family genealogy on my Dad's side is mapped out all the way back to the Mayflower era, and Sweet Husband's family is fairly well recorded too, the family history on my Mom's side is next to non-existent. What's more, my grandparents on that side of the family are both dead, and their siblings are all of an age where I feel like I need to get the information from them as soon as possible or it will be lost. (Yes, that's the polite and long way of saying they're very old.)
But trying to squeeze in visits during out already packed trips home, or communicate with the non e-mail generation (read: via snail mail letter) has made for slow going. Once I got the entire "great-great" generation filled in, I decided that, for safety's sake, it was time to organize all my scribblings, just in case I get hit by a bus or something!
Back to practical matters though, to make the chart the size you want, I would highly advise just following Martha's recommendation to take the file down to your local copy shop. I probably could have manipulated it myself, but the Nice Kinkos Lady made everything just the size I wanted, centered it up nicely, and printed it off for me--all for about twenty cents. (Mine is 11x17, so bigger sizes may cost more, but still....)
And the names I've learned...oh the names! We have an "Asro" (probably my favorite, although I understand he was not the nicest man)...an "Ezra" (very fun also)...a few "Clara's" (which I had never thought of before really, but I love)...several "Myrtle's" (which kind of makes me wrinkle my nose, but it evidently was in style for quite a while)...I could go on for days!
