Coats of Arms

We started off looking at heraldry in general and having the kids invent coats of arms.

My favorite is the one on the top right: Leena made a coat of arms that is, well, a coat made up of arms.

Ahem.

Anyway, at some point, I googled our last name with "coat of arms" and discovered that our family actually has one!

 Not only that, it actually told us something we didn't know about our family.  The hammer and chisel signify silver miners.  One thing we did know was the village our ancestors had come from, and it turns out to be next to a silver mine!

So, naturally, we tried shaking the family tree a little more!

We found a number of interesting crests, and this has kicked off a mini genealogy revival!  It's been fun to go through the heraldry and see what each coat of arms signifies.


Some of them even come with mottoes.  The McKnight motto translates to: "nothing is too difficult if you really want it." The Reichwald motto we've had a harder time translating.  Google tells me it means "for short and true."  I'm guessing there is another meaning to "short," maybe "direct?"  "for directness and truth?"

Anyway, we've been printing them off and hanging them as banners in our castle.  For the ones that were very pixelated, I had Klenda go over the edges with Marker to smooth them out a little.