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Position:Home>Genealogy> I have to do a Family Crest. I need a good ancestry/geneology website. Help?


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familysearch.org

that is the website set up by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or "The Mormons" it is completely free to use. If you need any other resources you can visit one of their family history library's that are located throughout the country. Services are free whether or not you are a member of the church.

Make one up. Use a dragon if you can draw well. There isn't any such thing. A crest is part of a coat of arms. Coats of arms, in turn, were invented so that you could tell which knight was which when they had their heads covered up.

They were given to individuals, not surnames or families. If, for instance, every knight named "Smith" (Carpenter, Baker, Johnson . . .) used the same coat of arms, there would be a crowd of knights riding around with the same coat of arms painted on their shields. It would be as confusing as a football game where both sides wore blue uniforms and all the players were number 12.

They were not given to just anyone, either; you had to be rich and want to brag, or else be born to a noble family.

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 have a given coat of arms at one time.

People who sell T-shirts and coffee mugs encourage the gullible to believe Coats of Arms are for a surname. Let us suppose Sir Peregrine Reginald Smith, born in 1412, had a wondeful Coat of Arms, a rampant dragon argent on a field azure.

Which would be easier - to sell that Coat of Arms on coffee mugs to everyone in the world named Smith, or to track down the eldest son of the eldest son of . . . Sir Peregrine, 14 generations later? That 14th great grandson might buy a coffee mug for everyone in his household, but that would only be four mugs.

If you could get 1% of the 3 million people in the USA named Smith to buy a mug, you'd be in retailer's heaven. Some of their ancestors might have been Schmidt in Germany or Smithowski in Poland, but who cares? 30,000 mugs at $11.95 each . . .

Read all about it from the Brits who do it for real:

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

They will tell it to you straight from the horse's mouth. Any straighter and it would be wet, with green flecks of hay in it.

Print off what they say and show your teacher. Then go to town with your colored pencils. You can have a family crest with an MX dirt bike or a fly rod or a stamp album or a concrete truck - whatever your dad does for fun or money is fair game.

Have fun!

As Ted says, make one up.

There actually isn't any such thing as a family crest. A crest is a small part of a coat of arms. Coats of arms DO NOT belong to surnames. Peddlers who sell them on the internet, at shopping malls, at airports, in magazines etc are scams.

Actually there might have been 5 different individuals with any one surname that were each granted their own coat of arms. The merchants of deceit that sell them won't have all 5, believe me. They don't need to in order to sell to gullible people.

Anytime you see one of those little walnut plaques on someone's den wall or they have a key chain or coffee cup with a coat of arms on it, that coat of arms is just one that was granted to someone with their surname and probably isn't even related.

Coats of arms were and are granted to individuals and are passed down through the direct legitimate male line of descent.
I understand those granted to persons who are knighted are not hereditary.

See the links below, one gives an outline on how to design a coat of arms, one from the British College of Arms and has various tabs at the top you might check out and the other from the most prestigious genealogical organization in the U.S., The National Genealogical Society.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites...

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

http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/comconsumerp...