Expert’s Choice
Many (most?) pedigrees on the internet purporting to trace normal people back to blue-blooded ancestors are wrong. This is mainly because their fabricators simply have no idea of the sources on which accurate lines are based. The basis for our knowledge of the landed gentry, through whose families these connections often run, are the pedigrees in Burke’s Landed Gentry (first published as Commoners) of the 19th and 20th centuries, often based (generally accurately, though not without errors) on gentry family pedigrees in older county histories. Many of these, for England and Wales, are derived ultimately from the pedigrees drawn by the heralds from the College of Arms during their visitations of the shires in the 16th and 17th centuries. Their aim was to determine who was using arms with proper authority, but the result was a rich genealogical corpus that is unsurpassed in most other countries.
The heralds still have their original records, which can be searched for a fee, but copies existed outside the college and many of these were published, with or without scholarly additions and updates, by the Harleian Society ( harleian.org.uk). Runs of these are held by good libraries, such as those of the Society of Genealogists ( sog.org. uk) and the Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies ( ihgs.ac.uk). The most accessible site for English counties is TheGenealogist ( thegenealogist. co.uk), filed by county under ‘Peerage & Heritage’ within the site’s ‘Peerage, Gentry & Royalty’ section, along with and Ruvigny’s The
It also has other resources that may help prove grand connections, including wills that were proved by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and Crisp’s Visitations of England and Wales.