Family heraldry and origins

Why “your family crest” is a category error

The bucket-shop heraldry industry sells a simple proposition: give us a surname, we will send you the arms. Every part of that is wrong. Arms descend by documented male-line descent from a specific armiger, under the jurisdiction of a specific heraldic authority. Thousands of unrelated families share any common Iberian surname, and at most one line among them has a claim.

For this site's readers the error compounds. A surname that appears in Inquisition records also belongs to entirely unrelated Old Christian nobility — often the families doing the prosecuting. Finding arms for your surname is as likely to connect you to the inquisitor as to the accused.

What the heraldic record legitimately gives you

• Named individuals in dated grants. A grant of arms is a document with a person, a date and an authority. That is evidence — about that person.
• Limpieza de sangre files. Far more useful than arms. Purity-of-blood investigations were genealogical proceedings, and they survive precisely because families needed to prove descent. They often record exactly the converso ancestry they were filed to deny.
• Toponymic evidence. Where arms are tied to a place, they point at a locality whose parish and notarial records you can go and search.

What to do instead

Work from the document outward. How to research your family line sets out the order: parish registers, notarial protocols, Inquisition case files, then limpieza proceedings. A named ancestor in a dated record beats every crest ever printed.