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Share your genealogical discoveries and bring them to life: 8 ideas to illustrate your family tree and impress your loved ones.
Illustrating your genealogy might seem difficult at first, due to lack of resources. But you'll see in this article that it's all about contextualizing the information you want to highlight in your illustration work. Almost everything can be illustrated, after all!
Nothing is better than family photos to put a face to a name, especially when you're trying to illustrate your genealogy.
You can consider that it's possible to find (depending on the social background) family photos dating back to the Second Empire and the beginning of the 20th century. To find them, start by asking older family members, then more distant cousins.
Once the photos are retrieved or digitized, you might need to do some more detective work to find out who is in the photo and/or when it was taken.
In addition to family photos, old photos can help you imagine your family history. You can illustrate a place, an event, or even clothing, for example.
You can search for illustrations on several websites: Gallica, Archim, Internet Archive, Library of Congress… Don't hesitate to also check the websites of departmental archives: they often present iconographic funds from the region.
In addition to family photos and old photos, old postcards can illustrate the places and activities of your ancestors. Those called "CPA" were mostly produced between 1900 and the start of World War I. At the time, it was a very common communication medium. In addition to a nice photo, you might find handwritten traces on the back of them.
In addition to flea markets, garage sales, and other old postcard selling sites, you can discover them on several websites: Old Postcards, Cartorum, CPArama…
What's better to illustrate your genealogy than views of your own family tree?
You can take screenshots of branches and useful information to start. But you can also use our family tree templates (here and there), fillable at your discretion, to highlight your research.
Free online sites also allow you to create a view of your family tree: Arbre-o-matic to generate a fan from your Gedcom file, for example.
Have you ever thought about adding screenshots of archive extracts in which your ancestors appear? It's yet a simple and practical way to illustrate your genealogy.
By adding the act to your argument, the latter will be all the more authentic. Moreover, your ancestors may have signed some registers! Another trace of their passage to highlight.
In heraldry, coats of arms are the figures present on the coat of arms of a city, a family, a person, or a fraternity. They can sometimes also be the symbol of a noble descent.
You can find information about armorials and family and regional coats of arms on Gallica as well as on the website FranceGenWeb.
Adding maps to your genealogy can be useful to locate the places where your ancestors lived, as well as their migrations, for example. Maps can also help you show a phenomenon by region. Moreover, you could, for example, compare old maps with current maps to show the evolution of a place dear to your ancestors.
To find old maps, consult our guide.
To annotate maps, you can use Google Maps, Umap, or even TimeMapper or Khartis.
Finally, many visual aids can help you illustrate your genealogy: infographics, tables, drawings, mind maps, or even timelines… Your creativity will be your only limit!
In addition to classic office tools, several online graphic creation tools exist: Canva, Piktochart, Infogram, Miro, Timeline…
⚠️ Warning! Before sharing your genealogy outside the family circle or for commercial use, make sure you own the usage rights of the illustrations you insert. Also remember, if necessary, to credit the authors of the illustrations.