Alexander Cheek
Genealogical History
This personal project of mine, a four month task, compiles both sides of my family—twenty generations in some cases—and nearly six-hundred years of ancestors and cousins. On paper it measures 36" by 120" and was built completely by hand in Adobe Illustrator CS2 [1] for Mac [2]. I considered using InDesign but was not sure about its final height and width. Either way, both applications have style sheets [3] which was critical for efficiency, though InDesign does have object styles in addition to text styles which would have been handy for keeping the lines at a standard 0.25 and 1.0 (hairline for vertical lines and non-blood, 1.0 for blood relationships).
Structurally, the chart reads left-to-right, instead of the regular bottom-to-top “tree” metaphor (which I hate). The horizontal layout lessened the amount of line clutter and greatly improved the flow and ease of use.
All entries were treated equally with full names, dates of birth, death, their locations, education and occupation. Typeset in 8-point Frutiger™ Next [4], I was able to fit hundreds of names with a fair amount of density but without any congestion. Other fonts that I considered: Helvetica Neue 47 Light Condensed, Bell Gothic Std Light, Gill Sans Std Light, Frutiger LT Std 45 Light, Univers LT Std 47 Light Condensed, and FF Scala Sans (because it's trendy and hot). 
Overlapping lines were inevitable—with inter-marriages especially—and were treated like underpasses on road maps. With only about half-a-dozen overlaps, the piece as a whole has nice large groupings of families without any interference. Each family branch is noted with a large title either in red for my father's side, or blue for my mother's.
Two timelines appear: an x-axis and a y-axis. Since the x-axis becomes staggered immediately one generation before me, the timeline follows the upper-most blood line of my father's family and notes the general time period with the titles of American generations [5]. This timeline is the closest reference to popular culture anywhere in the diagram; I wanted it to be mostly about the people, their relationships, and what can be achieved when a complex network such as this is presented visually.
The y-axis appears on the far left and gives immigrant data interspersed with general references to major events like the Mayflower landing, the settlement of Roanoke County, the Civil War and World Wars I and II. At the beginning of the 15th Century and the end of the 20th Century, the world's population is noted, starting at 500 million, ending at 6 billion. At the birth dates of my sister and I, two arrows direct the viewer into our names and they are then sent back in time from there.
The “end” of each branch, or at least the furthest back that can be traced, includes a short paragraph of what is known from about that time or before it, who immigrated where, what their lives were like, or where the family name originates.
In some cases the line ends because that was the time at which surnames came into existence. In other cases, records became too unreliable or were missing all together. For far-removed branches of cousins where it was impractical to continue, the end of the line was treated in similar fashion, pointing in the opposite direction with known dates and locations. These groups of data were set in Adobe Garamond Premier Pro [6] (look at that sexy Q).
Most of the information was passed down through family bibles and meticulous notes and the remainder was collected through census and church records [7]. It's my finding that descendent and ancestry charts that have been uploaded to the internet, verified or not, by well intentioned people frequently get reproduced and accepted as fact by relatives and researchers. When asked for documentation, not everybody can or is willing to provide it. In this chart's case, I included marginal notes on the far right to indicate where names or dates cannot be proven or are unclear, and the rest of the source material can be found six printed volumes and twelve filing cabinets in my father's office.
Since it is an ancestry chart, there is a strong and inherent focus on my sister and me. That's fine; that's who it was meant for. My goal was to create a pleasing and clear visual display unlike an automatically generated cacophony by one of the many database programs, and ultimately to make sense of who is related to whom when names are dropped at family meetings.
Printed on Epson Doubleweight Matte paper [8]. Poster frame from Rose Displays [9]. For more information, please e-mail me (arwcheek at gmail). Unfortunately I cannot provide full-resolution PDFs for privacy reasons, but I'd be happy to chat! <