Heralds Visitations

[Phoenix]

If you happen to have minor gentry in your family, then the Heralds' Visitations are a wonderful thing, providing lots of family trees to pour over.

Why then have some officious twits "improved" them by adding bits and bobs?

They have inserted a couple of spurious generations into one of my trees, so I have no means of knowing what was in the visitation and what was added.

*sulks*

[Olde Crone]

Um, Phoenix, I do have one original visitation where the head of family cheerfully lied through his back teeth as to his origins, his career, his marriage and his children, carefully leaving out the bits he thought reflected unfavourably on himself. Fortunately for me I found the documents which filled in the gaps (excommunicated for marrying his cousin and then dumping her), the fact that his eldest son was illegitimate and the fact that he too was considered illegitimate by the church.

I agree though, it's a brave man, or more likely a foolish one, who adds what they THINK to information given on the visitation.

OC

[Phoenix]

It fascinates me when relations produce their own trees: who is in, who is out. I have a few contentious relations airbrushed out of the pedigrees.

The heralds do get their own back on those branded ignobilis or sneering that an ancestor had to pay for his coat of arms.

I agree that you have to treat any statement with a huge pinch of salt.