How do you put a dog pedigree chart in a puppy packet?
Type the ancestors once, three or four generations back, and print the chart as part of each puppy’s packet, clearly labelled as recorded by the breeder. Three generations fits comfortably on a page and is what most families want; four is worth it when the names carry titles or health results that buyers recognise.
Three generations or four
Three generations — parents, grandparents, great-grandparents — is fourteen names and it sits legibly on one page at a readable size. It is the right default, and it is what a pet family will look at.
Four generations is thirty names, and the type has to get smaller to fit. It earns its place when your lines carry titles, working qualifications or health clearances that a buyer in the breed will recognise, because then the extra row is the argument for the litter rather than decoration. PuppyGoHomePacket does three by default and switches to four for the whole litter with one setting.
Either way the pedigree is entered once, for the litter, and printed in every puppy’s packet. It is the clearest example of why a per-puppy packet template is the wrong shape: it is thirty names that are identical in all eight copies.
What to call the page, and what never to call it
Label it as recorded by the breeder. A pedigree you typed is your account of the dog’s ancestry — usually accurate, often carefully kept, and still not a registration document issued by a registry.
So: no registry name or logo on the page, and never the words certified or official. Registration numbers belong there as plain text you typed, because they are useful, but the page must not be capable of being mistaken at a glance for the certificate the registry issues. This is the reason the page in this product is headed "Pedigree as recorded by the breeder" and cannot be renamed.
This is not legal caution for its own sake. A family who believes the sheet in the folder is their registration paperwork will not chase the real thing, and will find out two years later when they try to enter a show or register a litter of their own.
A pedigree chart maker beats a blank chart template
The difference between a blank pedigree form and a pedigree chart maker is what happens the second time you need it. Sires and dams are stored as dogs, not as fields on a litter — call name, registered name, registration number, sex, colour, date of birth and the ancestors behind them. The pedigree is attached to the dog, so the second litter out of the same dam does not mean typing thirty names again.
That is also where the parents’ health testing lives: the test, the result as it was issued, the date and the issuing body, typed by you and printed as typed. No badge, no logo, no interpretation of what a score means — the page states what was recorded, and the reader draws their own conclusions.
Related
Make this packet without retyping it eight times
PuppyGoHomePacket is a puppy go home packet maker for breeders: you enter the litter once — sire, dam, pedigree, weights, vaccinations, feeding plan — and it generates a finished packet for every puppy, a ZIP of the litter, and your own litter record. The editor is free and there is no account: build the whole thing and preview every page with your own dogs in it before deciding anything.
Last updated 2026-09-13.