The Family Coat of Arms 

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We have not published all of the Coats of Arms available for all family names. After all, there are tens of thousands of families that have a Coat of Arms. As of now, we have most of the more common names and will be frequently adding new ones.

Products with custom design options allow you to start with one of our basic products and customize it however you please. For example, you can take a coffee cup with your Family Coat of Arms and add your name or even put a family members picture on it. Or you can take a postcard or bumpersticker with the coat of Arms and add or change text to personalize it for a mailout for a reunion. There are no additional costs for setup or customization. Just start designing. It’s fun and easy to use drag-and-drop design tools with the ability upload your own additional images and add text in hundred of fonts and colors. The world doesn’t come in just 2 or 3 colors. Use as many or as few colors as you want. The price always remains the same.

If you do not want to do any customization and/or just want to view some additional product lines and do a little price comparison, we offer another choice. You can visit our non-customized product choices. Here you will also find many additional product choices that are ready to use "as-is". Many of these product choices are unique and may be available with outstanding volume discounts. If you are shopping for a group, reunion or have a large family gift list. Just click on the above link to check it out.

In most cases, your products will be on their way to you within 24 hours. With Express Mail, you can receive them in 1-2 days! Note: Custom Stamps and Dark Apparel normally ship in 2-3 days, and custom framed prints will ship in 5-7 business days. In many cases, there are also automatic volume discounts. The more you buy the more you save! Discounts may start at just 2 items for many product lines. You don't even have to buy the same design!

About the Coats of Arms

The terms Coat of Arms or Family Crest come from the Middle Ages when knights and noblemen used a linen padded metal "surcoat" to protect themselves. Embodied on these surcoats were charges and armorial devices (very colorful crests, shields and symbols), which the knights used to identify themselves. Since any one knight in armor would look similar to another, the Coat of Arms was important in identifying a knight in battle. It made it easy to see who was a friend or foe with a quick glance.

The Coat of Arms can have many parts but the main part is a shield. A charge is what is shown on the base color of the shield. The shield can have a crest above it, a motto, and supports (usually animals supporting the shield). Animals were frequently used as a main charge in coat of arms. Animals were shown in certain traditional postures, but they were not meant to be realistic pictures of the animals. They were drawn to depict the animal as a symbol. Usually the animals chosen were fierce, some are mythological animals, and they were often show in the positions of combat.

Some of the most common animals on shields of Coats of Arms were the Lion, Bear, Boar, Eagle, Horse, Dragon, Wolf, Unicorn, Hawk, Raven and Griffin. There were also names given for the positions in which the animals were shown. Some of the most common positions were Rampant (standing on hind legs), Rampant Guardant (standing on hind legs, facing the viewer), Passant (walking), Sejant (sitting) and Couchant (lying down). The "blazon" is a description of the shield in words, using a special vocabulary similar to a kind of old French. The terms used in heraldry are those of the aristocracy during the Middle Ages and were primarily French.

Royalty were the first to have heraldic Coats of Arms. There is some controversy in the genealogy world about authenticity of Coat of Arms because in olden times they were presented to individuals and passed down through the generations. So it is important to find historically correct Coat of Arms. The Coat of Arms was passed down from family to family. The eldest son would often inherit his family’s coat of arms without any changes but the younger male siblings would often add symbols to further identify themselves. The symbol a younger son added was usually a smaller picture placed in the middle of the shield. When a woman married, the Coat of Arms of her family was often added to her husband’s arms. Many times the Coat of Arms were quartered, or divided into different parts. Many Coats of Arms have belonged to the same family, being handed down from father to son for generations.

Are you entitled to use Coat of Arms? There are organizations like the College of Arms that anyone may apply to. Provided you are "worthy persons" and have no criminal record, you will be rarely refused. However, they charge fees for their services. The Coats of Arms presented here are taken from the books of either “Burke’s General Armory”, “Rietstap’s Armorial General” or “El Solar Catalan Valenciano y balear”. They are the most accurate Coats of Arms for the family names represented that you can obtain without spending a great deal of what would probably be wasted resources to produce the same results.