Chris Nicholson is a writer and fine-art photographer based in the northeast U.S. He offers decorating tips and sells limited-edition prints through his website, www.NicholsonPrints.com.  As a follow up to my post A Surefire Way to Choose the Right Matting, Chris makes some excellent points about choosing a mat for your custom framed family tree chart.  Chris writes: Hanging your family tree on the wall turns it into a piece of art — perhaps the most personal art that could …
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It’s easier than ever to find out if you have Irish background.  Ancestry.com today released a definitive collection of Irish genealogical records in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, and the list includes data regarding famous personalities such as Walt Disney, Conan O’Brien, and US President Barack Obama. The collection gives wonderful insight into eighteenth and nineteenth century life in Ireland and spans the period from 1824 – 1910 making it a must have resource for anyone searching their Irish roots. …
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Continuing with our blog post series that talk about how to make your own high quality framed family tree chart, we’re going to take some time to discuss a really important step in the process.  The type of backing or matting that you use for your family tree project is absolutely crucial to the overall success of this project. For those of you that may have missed the previous posts, we’ve previous discussed the types of paper that should be …
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A woman conducting a family ancestry search has discovered that she is the half-sister to television talk show host Oprah Winfrey. The woman, whose surname has been kept secret to protect her privacy, had been searching for her birth mother who had given her up for adoption in 1963. The trail began in Mississippi and ended up in Chicago, where she finally met with her long lost sibling on Thanksgiving Day last year. Recently she appeared on Oprah’s show, where …
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It’s true, we all have two family trees. – a genetic family tree and a genealogical family tree!  Let me explain. I recently spoke with a friend who attended a genealogical convention in Dublin, Ireland. This person had undergone DNA testing which compared his DNA with that of another person who he suspected might be related to him. It turned out that their DNA’s matched on 99% of Y-DNA markers; yet even though they suspected that they were third cousins, …
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As promised, here is the next step to making your very own custom family tree chart for framing.  My last post went into detail about the type of paper you should choose.  It’s absolutely crucial that you get the paper right!  If you haven’t read that post, do it now.  You have to be able speak “shop” to your printer or the art supplier to make sure you get the right paper that will last for decades.  Today, this post …
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Happy New Year! I hope you had a great holiday season and I want to wish you all of the best in 2011. Like some of you, I have made a New Year’s Resolution to do more genealogy research and to go even further back in my ancestors search.  So I just wanted to remind you about the free family tree templates you can download.

The first issue that you have to be concerned with when making your own framed custom family tree charts is your paper choice.  You may or may not be aware that there are a plethora of choices out there that you encounter when you want to print a large family tree PDF.  It can be a difficult choice and you have to know what you want before you print it out.  The wrong paper can be a costly error that …
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