The Beautifully Illustrated Family Records of Revolutionary War Soldiers
Families of Revolutionary War veterans applying for government pensions had to prove their relationship to the soldier in question. Many of them included illustrated family records in their petitions for payment, which are now kept at the National Archives. (Here are a few pages with more examples of this kind of record.)
The range of types of family records shows the diversity of visual traditions in the young United States. The first image below is hand-illustrated and lettered in German. It’s part of the tradition of fraktur, a Pennsylvania German