Family Trust-Irrevocable Family Trust

merc:

buy a metal detector

Syntinen Laulu:

There is ONLY ONE way, and anybody who tells you anything different is lying. It is:

1. Research your ancestry, properly, in a direct legitimate male line back to someone who was granted a coat of arms. Be aware that there is a better-than-ten-to-one chance that there is no such person in your ancestry and that neither you nor anyone in your extended family is entitled to a coat of arms, period. Most people aren’t.

2. Make contact with the heraldic authorities of the country where that coat of arms was granted; show them your research; and ask them to verify your claim to that coat of arms, or a differenced version of it. (The rules of heraldry vary from one country to another. In some countries *only* the head of the family – i.e. the senior member of the senior branch of the bloodline – is entitled to any arms. In others, the heads of the junior branches may be entitled to a “differenced” version – i.e. one altered in some way, e.g. by adding a marker, or altering the colours, to show that they are offshoots from the main line. Only in Poland is the whole clan entitled to the coat of arms.)

3. If the heraldic authorities agree that your claim is valid, they will register your entitlement to the arms, either the main coat or a differenced version. They will certainly charge a fee for this.

Obviously, no internet site can do this for you. Either you’ll have to do the legwork yourself, or you’ll have to hire a professional genealogical researcher to do it, which will be expensive.

Edited to add:

Hippiegreen’s answer is utterly wrong. “House of Names”, like all similar sites, simply uses old heraldic registers to pick out for every surname a coat of arms that was once granted to someone with that name. They then market it to suckers as “your family coat of arms”, which is utterly untrue.

Take the surname “Brown”. There are hundreds if not thousands of TOTALLY UNRELATED families called Brown in the English-speaking world – plus all the ones who have anglicised their name from German “Braun”. Dozens of these unrelated families have at one time or another been granted quite unrelated arms; Burke’s Armory, the standard directory of British and Irish armorial bearings compiled about a century ago, lists no less than 50 different coats of arms belonging to people called “Brown”.

House of Names ignores this inconvenient fact and cheerily picks one (which happens to belong to a medieval Aberdeenshire family, and which no living person at all is entitled to bear undiffferenced) and tells you that “this is the family crest of Brown”!

capitalgentleman:

An armorial achievement can only by one and the case but have one person arms you are meaningless.

Peg 24:

You have to prove “absolutely” that you are from the person who has the Coat of Arms in order to claim it. You must get in touch with the court of Arms where it is located.