Every kitten that leaves your home should go with a pedigree certificate — and yet I see more poorly made certificates than good ones. As a GCCF Full Judge and a breeder of Siamese and Oriental cats for over twenty years, I’ve handled thousands of pedigrees, and I can usually tell within seconds whether one was put together with care or knocked up in a hurry. A pedigree is the first impression a new owner forms of you as a breeder. Get it right and it tells them you take your cattery seriously. Get it wrong — a missing registration number, a colour coded incorrectly, a title left off — and it follows that kitten around for the rest of its life. Here is how to create a pedigree certificate properly.
First, what a pedigree certificate is (and isn’t)
A pedigree certificate is a record of a cat’s ancestry — its parents, grandparents and earlier generations, set out so anyone can trace the bloodline at a glance. It is not the same thing as registration. Registration is the act of recording a cat with a governing body such as the GCCF or TICA, which issues the official registration document. A pedigree certificate produced by you, or by a record-keeping tool, presents that ancestry attractively and accurately, but it does not itself register a cat or confer any registered status. That distinction matters: a beautiful certificate is not a substitute for properly registering your litter with the appropriate body. Think of the certificate as the family tree, and registration as the cat’s entry in the official records.
What a correct pedigree certificate must show
A proper certificate isn’t just a list of names. Each cat in the tree should carry the full set of information a knowledgeable owner or judge would expect to see. At a minimum, a correct pedigree shows the following for the kitten and, ideally, for every ancestor on it.
- The full registered name, including your cattery prefix. The kitten’s name should appear exactly as it is registered, not a shortened pet name.
- Titles, where earned — Champion, Grand Champion, Premier, Imperial and so on. By long convention these are shown in red so they stand out instantly.
- Breed and EMS colour code, the standard shorthand that tells you a cat’s breed, colour and pattern in a few letters and numbers.
- The registration number from the governing body, which lets anyone verify and trace the cat.
- Sex and date of birth of the subject kitten, and usually the date the certificate was produced.
- The correct number of generations, laid out cleanly with the sire’s side on top and the dam’s side below.
A four- or five-generation certificate is standard. Four generations covers parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents — thirty cats in total once you include the kitten. Five generations adds another sixteen ancestors. The more generations you show accurately, the more useful the document is, both for the new owner and for anyone working out coefficient of inbreeding later on.
The mistakes I see most often
After years of stewarding and judging, the same errors come up again and again. None of them are hard to avoid once you know to look for them.
- Wrong or missing colours. A seal point recorded as a blue point, or no EMS code at all. Colour errors are the single most common fault, and because they propagate down the line, one slip can mislead breeders for generations.
- Titles left off. If an ancestor was a Grand Champion and the certificate just says its name, you’ve undersold the very bloodline you should be proud of.
- Missing registration numbers. Without them the pedigree can’t be verified, which undermines the whole point of the document.
- Inconsistent names. The same ancestor spelt three different ways across a tree, or a prefix dropped on some entries and not others.
- Sire and dam the wrong way round. It happens more than you’d think, and it’s deeply confusing for anyone reading it.
The root cause of nearly all of these is the same: transcribing by hand from one document to another. Every time you copy a cat’s details across, you introduce a chance of error. The fix is to enter each cat once, correctly, and let the certificate be generated from that single source of truth.
How to build one correctly with Perfect Pedigrees
This is exactly the problem I built Perfect Pedigrees to solve. It is a browser-based pedigree and cattery record-keeping system — nothing to install, and it works on whatever device you already use. You build each cat once, and the certificate flows from there, formatted correctly every time.
There are two ways to add a cat. You can type the details in, choosing breed, colour, pattern and eye colour from proper lists so the EMS code is generated for you rather than guessed. Or, if you already have a paper pedigree or a PDF, you can simply upload a photo or document and let the system read it in — no typing at all. Behind the scenes you’re drawing on a curated pool of around 90,000 cats that has been checked by a GCCF judge, so many of the ancestors you need are already there, correctly recorded, waiting to slot into your tree.
Once your kitten’s ancestry is in place, the certificate renders the way it should: full registered names with your prefix, titles in red, breed and EMS colour codes, registration numbers, and a clean four- or five-generation layout with sire above and dam below. It builds both GCCF- and TICA-correct pedigrees, so whichever registry you work with, the output is right. You can also see the coefficient of inbreeding and genetic diversity for any cat, and run a trial mating before you commit to a pairing. You can read more about the finished output on the certificates page, and the how it works page walks through the whole process step by step.
One detail breeders appreciate: it’s free to build. You only pay when you print. So you can set up your whole cattery, get every certificate looking exactly right, and only spend anything when a kitten is ready to go to its new home. You can print at home, or order a posted card if you’d like something a little more special to hand over.
A final word on doing it properly
A pedigree certificate is a small document that carries a lot of weight. It’s a record of the work you’ve put into your bloodline, a tool the new owner will use if they ever show or breed, and a reflection of your standards as a breeder. Take the few extra minutes to get the names, titles, colours and numbers right, keep your records in one reliable place, and remember that the certificate records ancestry — it doesn’t register the cat. Do that, and every kitten leaves your home with a document you can be proud of.
Want certificates that are right every time? Perfect Pedigrees builds GCCF- and TICA-correct pedigrees from a judge-checked pool of around 90,000 cats — free to build, pay only when you print. Join the early access programme or see the pricing.
Written by Ross Davies — GCCF Full Judge, breeder and exhibitor of 20+ years, and a qualified feline behaviourist. Perfect Pedigrees is a breeder’s record-keeping and pedigree tool, not a registering body.
