No Photo – Try This!
You may have not photos of any type for some of your ancestors, especially those who lived in the 1600s-1700s and into a good portion of the 1800s, when there were no cameras. But what many people did was have a silhouette done. That is an outline all in black of their facial, hair and head to shoulders. True, it is not the same as a photo but it was the closest method used decades ago. Another was to have a painter do a painted portrait of the person, which could be very expensive, the simple silhouette was cheaper.
Now use that same idea for those ancestors you have no photo of to at least place some image of. Add to it a copy of any signature you might have also located of that ancestor. For females that can be hardest but true a prized item to find a signature.
If no signature available then you can do in a script font their full name, especially for the ladies include their maiden name. This will be much better than a blank for a thumbnail image on the family tree.
To make some of the fancier script fonts, there are several sites available online. There is ‘Fontmeme‘, any easy one to use.
Illustrated are my 2nd great grandparents – William Fitzwilliam Kershaw and Elizabeth Tetlow Kershaw of Manchester, England (1820s to 1880s) for there are no known photos.
Here two blank templates to use also.
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