If you’ve just collected a pedigree kitten, the folded certificate that came with it can look like a wall of names, abbreviations and numbers. I’ve been a GCCF Full Judge since 2014 and a breeder of Siamese and Oriental cats for more than twenty years, and I still remember how baffling my first pedigree looked. The good news is that once you understand the handful of things a pedigree is actually telling you, every line makes sense — and you’ll be able to read any pedigree, for any breed, with confidence. This is a tour for owners and new breeders alike: not how to win at shows, just what each part of the document genuinely means.
A pedigree is a family tree, read sideways
The single most useful thing to grasp is the overall shape. Your cat is named at the top or far left. Everything else on the sheet is its ancestors, and they fan out to the right in pairs. Read it like a family tree tipped on its side: your cat has two parents, each parent has two parents, and so on back through the generations. Once you see that structure, the rest is just detail filling in the boxes.
A pedigree is a record of ancestry. It is not, by itself, proof of registration — registration is a separate process handled by a governing body, which issues the cat’s official registration document. The pedigree shows you who the cat’s family are; it doesn’t register the cat. Keep that distinction in mind and you won’t be caught out.
The sire’s side and the dam’s side
Look at the two cats nearest to yours. The one on the upper half is the sire — the father. The one on the lower half is the dam — the mother. This top-is-father, bottom-is-mother convention holds all the way across the sheet, so the entire top band of the pedigree is your cat’s paternal line and the entire bottom band is its maternal line. If you ever lose your bearings, find your cat’s name and remember: up is the boys, down is the girls.
Generations: each column is one step back in time
Moving across the sheet, each column is one generation further back. The first column of ancestors is the parents (2 cats), the next is the grandparents (4), then the great-grandparents (8), then the great-great-grandparents (16). A typical certificate shows four generations; some show five, which adds another sixteen names. So a four-generation pedigree names thirty ancestors, and a five-generation one names forty-six. That depth is not just for show: the more generations recorded accurately, the more useful the pedigree is for working out how closely related two cats are.
Prefixes: the breeder’s signature in the name
You’ll notice many names begin with the same word repeated across a line — something like “Sunhaven” or “Bramblewood”. That’s a prefix (sometimes called a cattery name): a unique word granted to a breeder by the registry, which they put at the front of every cat they breed. It works like a surname for a cattery. When you see the same prefix appearing again and again on one side of a pedigree, you’re looking at the work of a single breeder’s programme over many years. It’s a quick way to see where a cat’s lines come from.
The names in red: titled cats
If your pedigree has names printed in red, those are titled cats — ancestors that earned awards in the show ring. The abbreviations tell you the level: Ch for Champion, Gr Ch for Grand Champion, Pr for Premier (the equivalent title for neutered cats), and grander titles such as Imperial and Olympian above those. Red ink is a long-standing convention precisely so these stand out at a glance. A pedigree dotted with red tells you there’s show success in the background, though it’s worth remembering a title reflects how a cat did on the day, not a guarantee about your kitten. Still, it’s a nice thing to see, and a fair indicator of the care taken with the line.
EMS codes: the breed and colour shorthand
After each cat’s name you’ll usually find a short string of letters and numbers — something like SIA n or BSH a 03. This is an EMS code, a standard shorthand that packs a cat’s breed, colour and pattern into a few characters. The first three letters are the breed (SIA for Siamese, BSH for British Shorthair, and so on), the letter that follows is the colour, and any numbers describe pattern or markings. You don’t need to memorise the whole system to read a pedigree — just know that this little code is the cat’s breed-and-colour summary, and that the same code should appear consistently for the same cat wherever it turns up in a tree.
Registration numbers: the cat’s unique reference
Most cats on the pedigree will carry a registration number from their governing body. Think of it as the cat’s unique reference. It allows anyone — a future buyer, a breeder, the registry itself — to identify and verify that specific cat rather than relying on a name that might be shared. If you ever need to confirm an ancestor’s identity, the registration number is the anchor.
Putting it all together
Take any single line on your pedigree and you can now decode it completely: the name (with the breeder’s prefix at the front), any title shown in red, the EMS code giving breed and colour, and the registration number identifying the cat. Multiply that across the sheet, remember that the top half is the father’s side and the bottom half the mother’s, and that each column steps one generation back, and the whole document opens up. What looked like a wall of jargon is really just a tidy, consistent family tree.
If you go on to breed, you’ll find a clean, correct pedigree is the foundation for everything else — choosing matings, working out how related two cats are, and handing the next owner a document they can trust. That’s where keeping your records properly pays off. Perfect Pedigrees is a browser-based system that stores your whole cattery and renders all of this automatically: prefixes, titles in red, EMS colours and registration numbers, in a clean four- or five-generation layout, built GCCF- and TICA-correct. You can read more about the finished certificate on the certificates page, and there’s a plain guide on the help pages if you get stuck. (Perfect Pedigrees is a record-keeping and pedigree tool, not a registry — it doesn’t register your cats.)
Want to build pedigrees as clear as the ones you’ve just learned to read? Perfect Pedigrees renders every name, title, EMS code and number correctly — free to build, pay only when you print. Try 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.
