Expert’s Choice

Anthony Adolph is a genealogist and wroteTracing Your Aristocratic Ancestors

Investigating heraldry online is perhaps more fraught with danger than any other branches of family history research, because so many internetbased firms have leapt onto the bandwagon of selling a “coat of arms for your surname” (when they only ever exist for specific family lines), with the miraculous ability to conjure a design up, regardless of whether one ever really existed. Much of the trouble is avoided by accessing reliable printed sources that are available digitally, and high on the list of reliability are the publications of the Harleian Society ( harleian.org.uk).

The society was founded in 1869, initially to publish heraldic manuscripts collected by the Harley Earls of Oxford. These included copies of the pedigrees of gentry families who were entitled to use coats of arms, made by the heralds during their visitations of England and Wales, from the late 1400s to the late 1600s. These ‘visitation pedigrees’ form the backbone of English and Welsh genealogy – they are often the root of the more elaborate pedigrees found in county histories and the Burke’s publications – and detail the ancestral lines down from original grantees through which the right to use many coats of arms is derived.

The publications listed on the society’s website might be better arranged by topic instead of volume number, but there are numerous links to out-ofprint books that are freely available online. Listed here too are books of marriage licences, obituaries, parish registers, pedigree collections and so on.