Author Topic: Swaffin  (Read 1863 times)

Offline astley7

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Swaffin
« on: Sunday 11 December 11 23:09 GMT (UK) »
Hi all

Would any one know where ther surname comes from and what its coats of arms would be.

Thanks

Lisa
Greenland, Carter, Saunders, Price, Andrews, Lewis, Issac, Astley, Thomas, Yeats. Badger, Drew, Francis, Matthews

Offline davidbappleton

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Re: Swaffin
« Reply #1 on: Monday 12 December 11 22:56 GMT (UK) »
If I may quote from the rec.heraldry MFAQ (found on-line at: http://www.heraldica.org/faqs/mfaq):

"'My name is Smith, what are my arms?'

The short answer is this: Your family probably has no coat of arms.  Most
families don't.  Discovering whether _your_ family has arms is a
time-consuming problem in genealogy.  Anyone who claims to be able to find
your arms simply by looking in a book or a database is either ignorant or
lying.


To explain in more detail, we have to clear up some misconceptions:

* There is no such thing as "the arms of Smith".  Arms are associated with
families or lineages.  A coat was inherited by a child from his parent,
either intact or somewhat modified.  But any individual's claim to use a
specific historical coat of arms rests on a family link with someone
acknowledged to have used those arms.

* Many unrelated families share the same surname.  (There are 2.5 million
Americans named "Smith".)  Sharing a surname does not mean that you share
the right to the same arms.

* Conversely, many families with different names have the same coat of
arms.  A coat of arms does not uniquely identify a family.

* A fairly small fraction of society ever used coats of arms at any time.
Only a few Smith families actually bore arms.  Arms were used throughout
the social scale, but much moreso at the top than at the bottom.  Most
Americans are descended from lower-class immigrants.  Statistically, then,
the chance that an immigrant ancestor of yours bore arms is not very high.

* No one on Earth has a complete record of all coats of arms used or
granted throughout history.

Therefore, if your name is Smith, and a book or a guy in a mall shows you a
coat of arms with the name Smith under it, that proves nothing at all.  You
are just as likely to be related to the founder of the Virginia colony, or
the Scottish economist, or the nephew of Senator Kennedy, or none of the
above.  The guy in the mall with the database is fudging these issues and
trying to sell you a pig in a poke.  His database is certainly incomplete
and probably very inaccurate, and he doesn't care about pedigrees.  He is
just out to exploit the similarity between your name and some name in his
database.

In order to determine what your arms are, we would need much more than your name: We would need your pedigree traced back to someone who used a coat of arms.  The standard of proof will vary with the needs: If you are of
Scottish descent and wish to matriculate arms with the Scottish heraldic
authority, you'd better have a well-documented pedigree, probably
stretching over several centuries.  If you only want to use arms for
yourself in a country such as the USA where heraldry is unregulated, then
it is just a matter of satisfying yourself."

That said, I know where my surname comes from (England), and what _my_ family's coat of arms is (which is different from all of the other Appleton coats of arms).

Why do you ask?

David