Finding out whether your family has a coat of arms.

Coats of Arms belong to individuals not surnames. A coat of arms is granted to one individual and passes to his descendants in the male line. To find out if one has a coat of arms by descent is a matter of family history. It is necessary to trace one's family as far back in the male line as possible and then see if any one in the resulting family tree of the family was granted a coat of arms.

How does one know if a particular person was granted a coat of arms? To be certain one must approach the heraldic authority under whose jurisdiction that person fell. In most cases this would be decided by the country in which they were living. But the heraldic authorities of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland all made grants to people living in the British colonies.

Each of the heraldic authorities will be likely to charge a fee for establishing whether a particular person or family is on official record with them as being entitled to bear arms. Some of the records of grants and confirmations of coats of arms have been published and it may be worth your while to make searches in these.

The records of the College of Arms, Lyon Court and the Genealogical Office, Dublin have mostly never been published, but a certain amount of them are in the public domain. The records of grants of arms which have been published most fully are those of the Court of the Lord Lyon in Edinburgh. Two volumes, An Ordinary of Scottish Arms, by J. Balfour Paul (1903), and An Ordinary of Arms, volume II, published by Lyon Court in 1977, give details of the matriculations of all arms in the Public Register of Arms in Scotland between 1672 and 1973.

Nearly all coats of arms appearing in A.C. Fox-Davies' Armorial Families, (1929 edition), are genuine and correctly attributed.

Many of the records of the visitations of the English and Welsh counties carried out by the English heralds between 1530 and 1689 have been published by the Harleian Society. But these published versions should be used with great caution as they often differ quite markedly from the official records held at the College of Arms.

More records of the arms of corporations have been accurately published than the arms of individuals. Geoffrey Briggs' Civic and Corporate Heraldry (1971) which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland is now rather out of date. Scottish Civic Heraldry 2 by R.M. Urquhart, 2001, supplements Scottish Civic Heraldry (1979). A.C. Fox-Davies' The Book of Public Arms (1915) covers corporate arms of the British Empire and some foreign arms as well. It is illustrated with many black and white line drawings.

Rouge Croix Pursuivant
December 2001