Coat of arms / ‘family crest’ Some interesting comments in my
last blog post (‘You only have to look’) made me wish I’d
replied into a separate blog post, so at least the comments
related to the topic. Someone said in a comment: Those “accept
anything they find without question” folks must be the ones who
patronize those generic “family crest” suppliers where you get a
crest of somebody, somewhere, who happens to share your surname.
I disagreed because I think you can hang anything on your wall
that takes your interest, but to say “my great grandfather was
…” without sufficient cross-checking to ensure you have the
ancestor who belongs to you – well it might be a very
interesting family tree, but it’s not yours. And I guess that’s
the same point the commenter made about how many people think of
a ‘family’ coat of arms. To be entitled to use a coat of arms
you must have either been granted it yourself or be descended in
the male line from the original grantee. My point was that I
might know that, and not actua