How do I find an accurate coat of arms?

Question

How do I know if my coat of arms is accurate? How far back in my family history do I need to go to find my name's country origin? Thanks.

Answer 1

You know it is accurate when you trace your family back to the man to whom it was awarded, or who bought one from the national College of Heralds.



You have to go back to the middle ages to find your name's country of origin. In England, they started up about the time of the Doomsday Book. In Sweden, the late 1700's. Either way, you trace until you find "John the Baker, son of Paul" names his son "Michael Paulson" or "Michael Baker' instead of "Michael the Carpenter, son of John".



I'm not saying you can do that reliably, until they invent time machines, but that's what you'd have to do.



Coats of arms started so knights could tell each other apart when they were buttoned up in their suits of armor. They were given to individuals, not families. If, for instance, every knight named Smith used the same coat of arms, there would be a small army riding around with identical shields. It would be as confusing as a basketball game where both sides wore blue and every player was number 12.



The eldest legitimate son inherits his father's Coats of Arms. He passes it on to his eldest legitimate son, and so on; that's where the myth of a "Family" Coat of arms comes from. Only one person can PROPERLY (See below) have a given coat of arms at one time. People who sell T-shirts and coffee mugs, however encourage the gullible to believe Coats of Arms are for a surname. (The Irish and Scots have clans, which have badges, which are different.)



Below:



If your surname is Smith and you come from Shropshire, you may find that Sir Albert Smith, Sir Bruce Smith and Sir Charles Smith, all from Shropshire, all had C of A. If you do your research, you may find you descend from Sir Charles, but you are nowhere close to being the eldest son of the eldest son of the . . .. Now comes the question - Is using his coat of arms proper? Opinions differ.



Some say it is like demanding "your" room in the ancestral Smith estate in Shropshire, from the current owners - ridiculous and illegal.



Some say it is like wearing a Regimental tie if you didn't serve in that regiment. (Land's End sells those by the thousands to Americans. I would never buy one.)



Some say it is like wearing a Scotch Plaid shirt when you don't belong to that clan. (LL Bean sells tens of thousands of those; I have Lindsay myself.)



Some say it is as harmless as wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap when you didn't play for the team, or a UC Berkeley T-shrt when you didn't attend the University. (Or an Ohio State one, but as long as you're going to wear a University T-shirt, why not the finest?)



So, there's the facts and three opinions about using a "Family" coat of arms. You can make up your own mind, after you do your research.

Answer 2

Using the county of origin plus the surname is not the way to find your inherited coat of arms, if you have one. The key concept is "descent from an armiger." This is how inheritance is established.



There might be a hundred different coats of arms for people with the same surname, and that's because individuals were either granted a coat of arms (Britain) or assumed a coat of arms (everywhere else). These different coats of arms are passed to their children, usually along the male line. But most lineages do not have anyone who used a coat of arms, and thus the descendants would not inherit arms.



Here is how heraldry works in Britain. Mr. Smith would pay the heraldic authority for a new design, and they would design and provide him with a coat of arms. Mr. Smith's cousin down the road would apply to the heraldic authority for a coat of arms, and his might be completely different. So the children of these two Smiths might have completely different coats of arms. Multiply this by a thousands Smiths and you get the picture.



Here is how the scam sites work. They pick one of the Smith's coat of arms, and then claim every Smith has a right to bear the arms. But this is clearly false, since the Smith you descend from had different arms or no arms at all. Sometimes the scam sites say there is an English and a Spanish version, for example. That is still bogus, because in Spain there might also be different branches with different coats of arms.



If you want to find YOUR inherited arms if they exist, you will need to trace YOUR patrilineal lineage and then contact a heraldry society in your immigrant ancestor's country.

Answer 3

The surname product business is a scam. Not too long ago there was an ad on TV for a company selling framed surname histories which is rather shady. When surnames were taken or assigned in Europe during the last millennium, it was for taxation purposes not to identify a man as a member of a family. Too many Toms, Bills, and Joes in the same town or village and they had to have a way of telling them apart. When they got through 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. Therefore your family history will not necessarily be the same family history of someone else with your surname. You don't necessarily have the same root person of your surname. The man in the ad states "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 in your shopping mall or airport selling coats of arms. Since the ad has stopped running it is quite possible that someone from the National Genealogical Society has filed a complaint. However, in the U.S. we have no laws regarding heraldry, but to display a coat of arms without documented proof that you are entitled to it is considered usurpation of identity.



Anytime you go into someone's home and see one of those walnut plaques on their den wall or over their fire place, what they are displaying is one that was granted to someone with their surname or a similar surname and very likely shares no known relationship. It is okay to smile to yourself but if you are a young person I will tell you what your parents would that it would be rude to laugh at people about things like that in their own home. A coat of arms that has been legitimately inherited will not be on a walnut plaque and it will not have a name over or under the coat of arms. Also whenever you see someone with a key chain, coffee mug, embroidered cloth, t shirt etc, chances are they bought it at Stuckey's.

Answer 4

You don't, for a simple reason. Coats of arms are never issued to families or surnames. They belong to individual persons (kind of like a war medal). Any of the online vendors are taking advantage of the fact that most persons buy before they research.

Your surname's "origin" is myth number 2. If your name is Lee.. are you English or Chinese? the name appears in both countries. MOST names are the same, NOT limited to a single country of "origin".

If you were someone named Lafayette, you might say "wow, I have French ancestry". Not necessarily. Unless you research your lineage, you may never find details, ie.. your gr grandfather was born in Germany, came to the US where his parents died, and he was adopted by the family down the street.

The ONLY ACCURATE way to know your heritage is to work from you, backwards, and use solid documents (birth/death certificates, census, tombstones, court records, church records, and many more) that you know apply to YOUR OWN ancestor.

Anything else and you are making assumptions that are often wrong.. or being scammed.

Answer 5

if your lineage has a coat of arms, there'll be a blazon on your letters patent. The heraldic artist can tell from the Blazon precisely the place the divisions of the guard are to be placed, and what the fees would desire to appear as if, and the place to place them. you additionally can get the blazon from a e book stated as an armory, and a heraldic artist ought to render from that blazon. they have them at some libraries. Blazon is a definite language it rather is meant for that purpose. no remember if it relatively is not any longer rendered actual you should land up with tattoos which would be laughed at in the back of your back. loads of rules to heraldry, like no metallic on metallic and what if the artist did no longer comprehend that? or made the incorrect shape of guard or used a pastel colour for the tincture. Yikes! additionally those agencies that sell coats of arms on the internet, at department shops and airports often sell fake advice, beware for them, they are scams.

Answer 6

If you have European Ancestry go Meedieval. Coats of Arms are given to whole nations and or duke states, so reasaerch your European ancestry on this topic

Answer 7

Also, be very careful about buying any publication supposedly a genealogy of your family. It's very unlikely you will find such. Whenever genealogies are published it is usually in very small quantities and they are only available until the person who publishes them either sells or gives them away.