It might seem very archaic but it turns out you really can be stripped of your coat of arms. That is, if you used fraud to obtain it. What seems to have happened is this. David Holliday, a Dallas attorney, wanted to be chief of the Halliday family. In Scotland, a chief of the name…
The Y Chromosome is older now
They found a new branch of the y chromosome that’s older than anything found so far. The human “The new divergent lineage, which was found in an individual who submitted his DNA to Family Tree DNA, a company specializing in DNA analysis to trace family roots, branched from the Y chromosome tree before the first…
French Nobles
“Pierre d’Hozier was a seventeenth century French genealogist and juge d’armes to the king. His job was to check on claims of nobility. His son, Charles, eventually took over the work and the position of juge d’armes. He created, at the request of Louis XIV, the Armorial général de France, a list of all the coats of arms in use at…
Deception
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. (The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.) — Anonymous
Women’s Name Changes
Some months ago I promised to find and post this quote about the practice in the Middle Ages of sometimes changing the given name of a wife. It wasn’t widespread, but it happened often enough to be worth noticing: “The wife was sometimes so completely absorbed into the family of the one man who had…