Fifty-six hands, in the order they went on the paper
Hancock first and alone, then the delegations north to south, Georgia last. Each hand here is the man's own: a vector trace of an archival scan of his signature, laid down at writing pace. Nothing is set in a font, and nothing is invented — where a hand could not be sourced, it would not appear.
Massachusetts Bay · 5
New Jersey · 5
Pennsylvania · 9
Maryland · 4
Virginia · 7
South Carolina · 4
Wikimedia Commons scans, traced with potrace 1.16. Retrieved 2026-08-20. The trace follows the scan; it does not smooth a hand into elegance it did not have. The reveal runs left to right, which is the direction these hands were written in — the desk makes no claim about the stroke order inside a letter, because nobody can know it.
The men themselves, and where each was born, are drawn on the survey plate in Fifty-six men who had somewhere else to be.