100 Day Family Tree (2021)

Looking back at my illustrated family tree

In the run up to this year’s 100DaysProjectScotland, I’m looking back at my previous ones – for my second year, I decided to make an illustrated family tree.

I’ve been dabbling in genealogy for years, but scrapped everything and started from scratch again at the beginning of 2021. I wanted to use the 100 days to pull everything together into one place for my (then three-year-old) daughter.

Each day, I drew a picture of an ancestor, wrote up a little summary of their life, and posted on Instagram. I had photos to use for the more modern generations, but illustrated the older ones based on period-appropriate clothing / hair and family resemblances.

The tree goes back to my daughter’s great-great-great-great-grandparents. The frames are coloured for each person’s birthplace – blue for Scotland, red for England, pink for Canada, purple for France, green for Ireland, and orange for Jamaica. Each leaf represents another child from that family. In some of the branches, there were so many children who were born and died between census years that my research has actually doubled what we thought the size of the family was.

Playing on Photoshop & the finished item

The project started on June 1 and I posted my final tree on September 8.

You can see a selection of the drawings under the hashtag #100DayFamilyTree or all of them by scrolling back through my profile - https://www.instagram.com/randomlygen.