I need to find my family crest for a project?

Question

my last name is Capehart, and for school we are doing a project on family crests and coat of arms. do you know where i can look it up and get a picture of it and get some history?

Answer 1

Wow, I'll be interested to see the responses you get to this question. What exactly are the instructions for this project? Can you edit your question and add more details? What is your teacher asking you to do?



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Ohhhh, okay. It sounded like your teacher was asking you to "find your family crest." As the others have said, that would be nearly impossible for most people, because coats of arms belonged to individual people -- not entire families, and definitely not everyone with the same last name.



But anyway... designing a coat of arms for YOUR family, based on your own family's history and traditions, DOES sound like a fun and interesting project! And Capehart is a pretty cool last name... you can do lots of things with that! Fun!



Now, keeping in mind that the meaning and origin of your name doesn't really tell you anything about your actual ancestors or family history (for that, you'll need to talk to your family members), here's some information on your name:



Capehart is an Anglicized version of the German name Gebhart. Here's what ancestry.com says about it:



German: from a Germanic personal name composed of the elements geb ‘gift’ + hard ‘hardy’, ‘brave’, ‘strong’. A saint of this name was bishop of Constance around the end of the 10th century, and his popularity may have had an influence on the continued use of the personal name into the Middle Ages.



And here's what SurnameDatebase says about Gebhardt:



Recorded in many forms including Gabert, Gebhardt, Gebhard, Gepheart, Gobhardt (German), Gibard (French), Gibbard (English), and others, this is a surname of Germanic pre 5th century origins. It is said to derive from the elements 'geb or gep' meaning a gift, and 'hard' meaning brave or hardy, and was a popular personal name in the centuries before the creation of surnames in the 12th century. One of the first name holders was St. Gebhard, the bishop of Constance in the 10th century. It may be that his association with the name ensured its continuing popularity at a time in the Medieval period when such old fashioned and sometimes pagan names, were being swept aside by the ingress of names from the bible. Thse were usually of Hebrew or Greek origins, and themselves associated with the famous Crusaders of the 12th century. There were twelve Crusades, all unsuccessful, to try to free the Holy Land and in particular Jerusalem, from the Muslims, and returning soldiers would given their children so-called Christian names, to commemorate the father's prowess. This particular name, although not at the time what we would call today a surname, is one of the earliest recorded in Germany with that of Gebhart filius Gebhardi in the year 1180. Some two centuries later by which time surnames were taking on their modern form, we have that of Lyebart der Gebhart of Tegernheim, Regensburg, in 1361.

Answer 2

If there was such a thing as a Family Crest or Family Coat of Arms you would think that these would be freely available to everyone, Sadly this is not so. There are people out there making heaps of money out of the production of these so called family crests. My brother paid for such a crest in the UK, It would appear it's a fake also.

Answer 3

A project like this can take several months, maybe years.



If students must look up their family crests based on their surnames, then the teacher has fallen for the biggest scam on the internet. The first tipoff that family crest websites are scams is that they use the word "crest," which is really just the design on top of the helmet (think of a bird's crest, like on a cardinal). What you are looking for is a coat of arms, not a crest. The second tipoff that they are scam sites is that they associate surnames with arms. Duh! There are hundreds of coats of arms owned by people named Smith, but they sell only one. So they are selling you another person's coat of arms!!!!



If you descend form a German line originally named 'Gebhardt,' then to find your coat of arms (if you inherit one, which is not likely), you need to do some heavy duty genealogy. Find out where YOUR Capehart immigrant ancestor came from in the old country, when he was born, and in what city or village. Then contact a heraldry society and ask them to do a lookup. Or once you know where YOUR Capehart family came from, write someone there who has the last name. Most likely they are your distant cousin and can supply you the information you are looking for.



I highly recommend you read this for more information and print it out for your teacher:



http://www.heraldica.org/faqs/mfaq

Answer 4

If your four grandparents are still alive, ask them about THEIR grandparents and parents. With luck you'll get 8 great grandparents and 16 gg grandparents.



If one was a farmer, put a plow on your family shield. If one played baseball, put a bat on it. If one loved to fish, put a fly rod on it.



If one paid for his college education by smuggling 4 -5 pounds of marijuana once a month from a border town in Arizona to Ames, Iowa, hidden in the quarter panels of his 1965 Dodge Road Runner, doing 85 - 90 along the interstate late at night and pretending to be a redneck trucker fan, it would make a heck of a story but your uncle would probably not tell you about it unless he had been drinking heavily. Mine doesn't.



You probably won't run into anyone famous. Interesting is another story.

Answer 5

Your teacher sounds a tad ignorant to me. First off, not every family has a Family Coat of Arms. In fact, several don't. Also, even if the surname has a Coat of Arms, you still can't be sure it's your family, and you sure has heck can't be sure of your family origins. That's found through tracing your genealogy. That being said, this website may help you: http://www.houseofnames.com/fc.asp?sId=&s=Capehart



ADD: Ashley and Stork made some very good points I failed to address. #1. A Coat of Arms did not belong to an entire family, it was awarded to one man, and then passed on to his eldest son, like a title. (Wives, daughters, and younger sons could also bear the arms to indicate their relation to the individual). #2. I do not at all recommend you purchase a Coat of Arms from the website I sourced. I was just giving you something to copy when drawing the coat of arms for your project.

Answer 6

Well, your last name is and Americanized form of the German 'Gebhardt.'

:) you can look up more of your family history on Ancestry. Or maybe get some info from one of your family members?

Answer 7

well... you could go on Google.com and search up some sites.... but you could try ancestryhunt.com it's free... Good Luck on your project!

Answer 8

There is no such thing as a family crest. A crest is part of a coat of arms. Coats of arms do not belong to surnames and as a matter of fact in a lot of countries they don't belong to families.



There are numerous peddlers on the internet, at shopping malls, in airports, in magazines selling coats of arms like they belong to everyone with the same surname. Frequently more than one man with the same surname, not all necessarily related, were each granted or they assumed their own coat of arms, all different. No one of those peddlers will have all of them. They don't need to in order to sell to suckers. The only time they will have more than one associated with the same surname is if more than one man from different national origins were granted or they assumed a coat of arms. Then they will have one of each and there might have been 50 others. Most men with that same surname were never granted or did they assume a coat of arms and their descendants aren't entitled to one at all.



In the U.S. we have no laws regarding heraldry and a person is free to display any coat of arms they wish but to do so without documented proof that you are entitled to it is considered usurpation of another's identity. If you have pride in yourself you certainly don't want to take on another's identity.



The surname product business is a big scam. Not too long ago there was an ad running on TV for a company selling framed surname histories which in itself is rather shady as not everyone with the same surname will have the same family history. When surnames were assigned or taken during the last millennium it wasn't impossible for legitimate sons of the same man to wind up with a different surname and still each could have shared his surname with others with no known relationship. They were started for taxation purposes not to identify a man as a member of a family. Too many Toms or Horatios in the same town or village and they had to have a way of telling them apart. The man in the ad stated "a" coat of arms will be on it not "your" coat of arms. You see on TV the FCC can slap a company hard for fraudulent advertising. The FCC has no control over the internet or some merchant with a booth in your local shopping mall. The ad has stopped running and it is quite possible someone from The National Genealogical Society filed a complaint.



Here are links to various countries heraldry



http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/Faq.htm

http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/About/12.htm#a

The College of Arms grants coats of arms for England, Northern Ireland and Wales. They do not belong to families but to individual men.



http://www.lyon-court.com/lordlyon/216.181.html

The Lord Lyon of Scotland grants coats of arms for Scotland. There they are tough on a person displaying a coat of arms without proof that it belongs to them. A few years back there was a man with a coat of arms as a stained glass window and he was asked to remove it as it was not his. When he wouldn't officials from the Lord Lyon went into his home and removed it leaving a big drafty hole. Now, in Scotland they do have clan badges.



http://www.nli.ie/en/heraldry-introduction.aspx

http://www.heraldry.ws/info/article10.html

This is regarding Irish heraldry. In Ireland there are arms that are/were granted to individual men and there are clan arms.



http://www.regalis.com/onom.htm

This is regarding Italian heraldry



http://www.szlachta.org/heraldry.htm

This is regarding Polish heraldry. Poland is one country where they belong to families, dynastic families.



When you go into someone's home and you see one of those walnut plaques with a coat of arms on it just smile to yourself. The owners probably really believe it belongs to them. I will tell you what your parents would. It would be very rude to laugh or make some deprecating remark about that in their own home. You can buy key chains and coffee mugs at Stuckey's with someone's coat of arms on them.



Now if your teacher really indicated that you should have a coat of arms, please print of the links I have furnished you and give them to him/her.

Also feel free to print off what I have posted here and give to her. If you feel it would get you in trouble put it on his/her desk when he/she is out of the room.



You can design your own if you wish.