My last name is Gaffney, I know my relatives come from Ireland, but was curious about the family crest and if it means anything in particular to my own ancestors.
What Does It Mean If Your Family Has A Coat Of Arms?
Archived in the category: Answers
Posted by Admin on 02 Jan 10 - 4 Comments
4 comments for “What Does It Mean If Your Family Has A Coat Of Arms?”
1
storkarh
There might be a hundred coat of arms for people with the same surname, and that’s because individuals (not families) were either granted a coat of arms (Britain) or assumed a coat of arms (everywhere else), and then passed them on to their children.
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 thousand 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 arms.
2
Syntinen Laulu
Shirley T is right, so pay attention to what she says! Just because your name is Gaffney and there is a coat of arms associated with the name Gaffney, that doesn’t mean that you, or indeed anyone in your family, has any right to it. (Indeed, there may very well be several different coats of arms that have been granted to different people called Gaffney – all of whom may be quite unrelated to you – at various times.)
However, you asked if “the family crest” “means anything.” Answer, maybe, maybe not.
The crest in a coat of arms (note that “crest” is NOT an alternative word for “coat of arms” – the crest is just one element of a complete coat of arms) represents the crest that a knight wore on his full-face helmet as an extra aid to identification. Obviously in the case of post-medieval grants of arms these crests are imaginary. But back in the Middle Ages, a knight’s coat of arms was a genuine representation of the crest and shield that he really wore and carried when fully-kitted for war or tournament. Crests could consist of feathers (e.g. the three ostrich plumes that are the crest of the Prince of Wales) or painted fan-shapes, or figures moulded in boiled leather. You can see examples, and a discussion on how they were made, in the second link below.
What did they mean? Quite often, nothing. A knight deciding what to put on his shield and his helmet was limited by several considerations:
- Was it distinctive? If it was the same as, or even very similar to, the arms being borne by any other knight in the kingdom it failed its primary purpose of identification.
- Was it easy to make out at a distance? A gold-on-silver or a blue-on-black design would simply be a blur, which is why these and similar colour combinations are banned in heraldry.
- In the case of the crest, could it physically be put on top of a helmet?
Within those limitations, a knight could choose pretty much anything he liked. He MIGHT choose something that was meaningful to him or his family. E.g. if his power was due to the number of bowmen in his following, he might choose bows as a motif. There are a number of coats of arms that are puns on surnames (bows for Bowes, lions for Lyon, and so on). And many of the motifs available to choose from had a general symbolic meaning – the lion, the king of beasts, was generally understood to symbolise royalty, power, courage. But very often he just picked something he thought would look good, in the colours he liked best.
So, to know if a given coat of arms “means” anything, you have to know who first bore it, and something about him. The motifs and the colours have NO consistent significance – you’ll notice that the two motifs I’ve mentioned, bows and lions, could be chosen for a coat of arms for at least two totally different reasons!
3
Shirley T
Families really don’t have coats of arms. Individuals do. There are numerous peddlers on the internet, at shopping malls, in airports, in magazines that sell them like they belong to everyone with the same surname but they don’t.
Frequently more than one man with the same surname, not all necessarily related were each granted their own coat of arms, all different. No one of those scam merchants will have all of them. They don’t need to in order to sell. The only time they will have more than one coat of arms associated with any one surname is if more than one man with the same surname from different national origins were granted one. Then they will have one of each, and there might have been others. Many men with that same surname were never granted a coat of arms and their descendants aren’t entitled to one at all.
A crest is part of a coat of arms. In Ireland there are clan arms and only the chief is suppose to display a full coat of arms. Other members of the clan may display only the crest as a belt buckle.
Here are a couple of linkshttp://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/Faq.ht…http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/About/…
They grant coats of arms for England, Wales and Northern Ireland and at one time for all of Ireland.http://www.heraldry.ws/info/article10.ht…
This is regarding Irish heraldry.
4
Illyj
The answer varies from country to country. In Great Britain I think there are invidual coat-of-arms… but for example in Poland and Lithuania coat-of-arms were given to clans which consisted of families that often had nothing in common with each other. Though I really don’t know how it was in Ireland…
January 3rd, 2010 at 5:36 am