How to print thank-you card labels from your funeral guestbook

A funeral guestbook fills up in an afternoon. A hundred and eighteen people sign it, and some smaller number — thirty, forty — write down where they live. Two weeks later the family is at a kitchen table with a box of thank-you cards, working from that book, hand-addressing envelopes one at a time and reading someone’s handwriting wrong.

That is the job this page is about: turning the addresses already in the book into a sheet of printed labels.

Buy the right sheet first

The stock to buy is Avery® 5160. Avery’s own template page gives it as 1" x 2-5/8", 30 per sheet — the standard address label, three across and ten down, and the sheet most offices already have somewhere.

One trap worth knowing before you’re standing in an office supply aisle: 8160 is the same label. Avery says so plainly on their 8160 page — “They’re the same size, but 8160 labels are designed for inkjet printers, while 5160 labels are made for laser printers.” Same size, same grid, same thirty per sheet. Different coating for a different kind of printer. If you bought the wrong box you did not buy the wrong size, and the sheet will still line up.

There is a second sheet worth knowing about before you order a case of the first. Avery 5162 is 1-1/3” tall against the 5160’s 1” — fourteen to a page instead of thirty, with the address set larger. It costs more than twice the paper per envelope. It is the right sheet when the people receiving the notes will be glad of bigger print. Both live under Label printing options on the download, where the choice reads 30 per sheet — the usual address label against 14 per sheet, larger type.

Export the labels

In FuneralGuestbook, open the service and download the labels. What comes back is a PDF laid out at exact 5160 geometry — thirty labels a page, already positioned — for the guests who left a mailing address.

The download reports two numbers, and the gap between them is the important part. If it says 31 of 118 guests left a mailing address, nothing has gone wrong. A guest signing on the iPad at the church types their name and often stops there; a family member signing from a phone may give a city rather than a street. The book holds what people wrote in it. Anything that promised a label per guest would be promising something the book cannot contain.

That gap is worth reading as information rather than as a shortfall — it is the single clearest measure of how much of your aftercare list you actually captured, and it is a problem worth fixing upstream, at the moment of signing, rather than downstream at the printer.

The one print setting that ruins a sheet

Print the PDF at 100%. Not “Fit to page,” not “Shrink oversized pages,” not “Scale to fit.”

This is the most common way a good sheet comes out wrong. Fit-to-page exists because printers can’t put ink all the way to the paper’s edge, so the viewer quietly shrinks the whole page by a percent or two to keep everything inside the printable area. On an ordinary document nobody notices. On a label sheet the shrink pulls every row a little further from where the die cuts are, and the error grows as you go down the page: the top row looks fine, the middle row looks slightly high, and by the bottom row the text is straddling the gap. If your first attempt came out drifting downward, this is almost certainly why, and it is a two-click fix rather than a template problem.

The setting is usually called Actual Size in Preview and Adobe Reader, and 100% or Scale: None in a browser’s print dialog.

If the sheet in your drawer is half used

Every funeral home has a drawer with part-used label sheets in it. Printing six labels onto a fresh thirty means peeling six and throwing away twenty-four, so the export can start further down the sheet instead: open Label printing options and set Start at label to the number of positions you want left blank.

Count them the way the printer fills them — top-left first, across each row, then down. If the first four are gone, you skip four. Count wrong and the print lands on the backing paper rather than on a label, so it is worth counting twice; a fresh sheet and no skip is always the safe answer, and it is what the plain download does.

Print one page on plain paper first

Before you commit a sheet of labels, print page one on ordinary paper and hold it against a blank label sheet up to a window. The die cuts should sit inside the printed rectangles with a little room on every side. It takes twenty seconds and it is the difference between finding a scaling problem on a sheet of copier paper and finding it on the thirty labels you have.

If it lines up on plain paper, it will line up on the labels.

What you do with them

Peel and stick. The labels carry the guest’s name and mailing address as it was written in the book, so the envelope is addressed to the person the family remembers signing, not to a household record from somewhere else.

The whole point of doing it this way is that nobody in the family sits down and copies thirty-one addresses out of other people’s handwriting two weeks after a funeral. That job is where acknowledgments quietly stop getting sent — not because anyone decided against sending them, but because the input was a stack of handwriting and the week got away. Take the transcription out and the notes get written.