Coat of Arms
It had been so many years since anyone had brought up the family coat of arms that I forgot we had one. After all, most people in my neighborhood did not have a family crest. We certainly weren't royalty anyway, nor were we particularly British. We were, in all respects, your typical American family. We had concepts of nobility, sure, but they had to do with right conduct in day-to-day situations. We generally do not think of ourselves as belonging to a noble heritage.
That all changed when one day my son came home with a project. He was actually researching medieval heraldry. Out of curiosity he asked us if we had a family crest, and I couldn't remember for sure. I do seem to have some vague recollection of grandpa talking about our coat of arms at one point, but I couldn't be sure. I knew that there was a family motto that he kept in his study, but everyone had always insisted that he made it up himself. I suppose that he had the right to he was grandfather after all. Still, there's something about having a family motto that was invented within the last 50 years it gave it less legitimacy.
A coat of arms would be different, however. My grandfather was in most respects a modern man, and he would not have displayed something so medieval without good reason to. If there was something like that in his study, you can bet that our family had a right to it. My son decided to look it up, and I decided that I would help him.
When I started looking into the coat of arms, I was pretty amazed by what I found. I had always assumed that they all looked the same a shield with some particular decoration in a few different colors, but basically the same design every time. What I discovered was that there is a huge variety of different design ideas. No two coats of arms were the same, and not all of them even had the basic shield and sword composition. Some of them had castles, mythical beasts, trees, wells pretty much anything that you would see in an iron age world. We still haven't really found our own unique family herald, but we are getting closer. We actually found a company that will do the research for you if you're willing to buy a souvenir replica of it from them, and we have just commissioned them to start looking. It won't be long now any day.
