The Great Greats

Family history, but make it cinematic.

This is a living archive, a storybook, a studio. Here, ancestral memory meets creative direction. We trace lineages not just through names and dates, but through aesthetics, photographs, handwriting, and heirlooms of voice.

What began as a 45-year family history project has evolved into something more — a curated universe of people, places, documents, and dreams. From Union City to London, from Troy, Tennessee to the runways of Paris and the studios of Los Angeles, our family stories crisscross centuries and landscapes.

We follow the Walker, Forrester, Pace, Surrency, Edens, Mauldin, Lynch, and Gantt lines — from the South Carolina Piedmont and Pickens County to the Georgia coast, the Tennessee river towns, and the Florida frontier.

But the work started long before me.

For forty-five years, my grandmother Mary Lois Douglas Forrester gathered these lines — half a dozen books, hundreds of articles, thousands of records pulled from courthouses, church ledgers, and letters that almost didn’t survive.

I was eleven when she started taking me along. We’d sit at the University of Florida library winding through microfilm and microfiche, laughing, chasing a name across a county line. She made it feel like detective work. It still does.

I inherited the archive, and the responsibility that came with it. I’ve been scanning ever since.

Her books are still available. → Message me for information

This is my creative practice.

I’ve built brands across fashion, heritage retail, wellness, and publishing — from Ralph Lauren and Burberry to bespoke consultancies for modern storytellers. But The Great Greats is the project closest to my heart.

Here, I restore gravestones. Design archives. Print old love letters on letterpress. And I write — about the bold, flawed, beautiful humans I come from.

This is not just genealogy. It’s storytelling as preservation. It’s art direction as memory care. It’s branding — but for the ancestors.

Join me. Not just to discover what we inherited — but to design what we carry forward.

🖋 Will Forrester Founder, The Great Greats Advisor to Heritage Brands | Keeper of Unruly Family Legends