"It's Everywhere! It's Everywhere!"

One of my favorite quotes to cite when talking to genealogists about heraldry is one from author L.G. Pine in his book Heraldry and Genealogy:

At the outset there is a curious fact in the relationship between the two subjects.  While students of Heraldry do take to Genealogy and acquire a considerable knowledge of it, those who begin as genealogists seldom if ever take any interest in Heraldry.  This is most unfortunate because the two subjects are necessarily connected.

I ran across an example of a link between heraldry and genealogy while attending last year's Federation of Genealogy Societies in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the front of a pamphlet for The Society of Indiana Pioneers.

Now, no one would call this a "real" coat of arms; it's a heraldry-like logo which falls into several of the all-too-common mistakes (or at least, misunderstandings of good heraldic design) made by organizations which want a "crest" design for their logo.  For example: it's a quarterly shield with completely different charges in each quarter; it has metal upon metal, thus falling afoul of the rule of contrast; the overall charge in the center faces to sinister rather than dexter; it adds a skinny chief with the name of the group on it (also with low contrast, making it harder to read than it ought to be*); it surrounds and divides everything with gold edging.

As pleased as I am to see people trying to use heraldry and arms-like logos, I wish they'd learn just a little bit more about some of the basic rules of heraldry before creating some of their designs. Because this could have been so much better than it is.

But it is yet another example of the ability to find heraldry (or heraldry-like designs) everywhere!


*  Indeed, were the gold and white to change places, it reminds me of the time when the State of Michigan, which changed the colors of its automobile license plates every few years, one year went to white lettering on a gold ground.  There were so many complaints from law enforcement officials all across the state because they could not read the lettering except under the best of conditions - which Michigan often does not have - that the state went to a high contrast combination the very next year, having learned the hard way that the heraldic rule of contrast applies to much more than identifiability in heraldry.

A Last Bit of Faux Heraldry in Fort Wayne

Finally, we ran across this sign (my fault, I'd made a wrong turn driving back to our hotel from the conference; a happy, I supposed, mistake) that is certainly trying to be heraldic.

It isn't, exactly, though.  While it is certainly placed on a shield shape, the most heraldic part of it is a variation of the Royal crest of Great Britain (and Canada, for that matter, and New Zealand, and so on) (atop an arched crown a lion passant guardant wearing an arched crown), placed in the chief part of the shield instead of atop or above the shield (in the usual place for a crest).  The fact that the arched crown and lion appear to be divided per pale is certainly a difference from the Royal crest, but the overall impression of the Royal crest is hard to avoid, and that impression may very well be exactly what they were trying to mimic.

Is there even more heraldry and heraldry-like items that I may have missed in Fort Wayne?  I fully expect it, but the fact is that I was there attending a conference and didn't have a lot of time to cruise the streets looking for coats of arms, real and otherwise.  Still, I think the last several posts here adequately demonstrate once more my belief that "you can find heraldry everywhere!"

Is It Real, or Is It (Well, Not Memorex, but....)

Next door to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the MacDougal Memorial Chapel.  It's a large round building, that in a way rather reminded me of the baptistery near the Duomo in Florence, Italy.

However, other than that initial impression, the two buildings are entirely different in style and decoration.  And the decoration here that caught my eye were the armorial panels over the windows.  There were two sets of eight shields, which were repeated as they went around the building.  Here are close ups of the two sets.

The first panel is done on heater shield shapes; the second on roundels.

The top row in the first panel is, from left to right, the Holy Spirit descending the form of a dove, the crossed keys of St. Peter, the chalice and host of Communion, and three stalks of wheat bound by a ribbon.  The second row is a cross couped (sometimes called a Greek cross), a grapevine fructed, three escallops (the escallop shell being a symbol of pilgrimage, particularly in reference to a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostela, Spain), and a sword inverted entwined by a snake.

The top row in the second is another grapevine fructed, the Chi Rho, three stalks of wheat bound by a ribbon, and a chalice with a cross issuant from its bowl.  The bottom row of the second panel is two fishes in saltire (heads downwards), the chalice and host again, a Latin cross surmounted by a monogram of the Greek letters alpha and omega, and a pomegranate.

As you can easily see, these are all religious symbols, many with Biblical referents.  Are they "real" heraldry?  I do not believe so, but they are certainly appropriate architectural elements appended to a chapel.

Real Heraldry in Fort Wayne

Lest you think that the only "heraldry" that I found in our trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana was not really heraldry at all, just across the street and around the corner from the Embassy Hotel with the heraldry-like decorative elements was the following, on the Chancery Office attached to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a part now of the Diocese of Fort Wayne - South Bend.

What a great, clean coat of arms!  Simple, easily identifiable, everything that you could want in heraldry.  Of course, it got more complex when the diocese was combined with that of South Bend.

It is an unusual form of marshaling two coats of arms onto a single shield, basically Per fess in chief Fort Wayne and in base South Bend.  Still, I'm not sure how else they could have done it (short of just taking some elements from each coat and combining them into a single coat of arms) given the Church's practice of using the arms of a diocese marshaled with the personal arms of the bishop as arms of office.

Still, I prefer the simpler coat of the Diocese of Fort Wayne over the marshaled coat of the Diocese of Fort Wayne - South Bend.

More Faux Heraldry in Fort Wayne

The big achievements of "arms" with the blank oval shields on them that I discussed in my last post were not the only "heraldry" to be found on the facade of the Embassy Hotel in Fort Wayne.  Also to be found were several shields identical to this one.

While not a blank shield, I do not believe this to be real heraldry either.  Were the markings on the field hatching, the blazon would be something like Per pall gules, purpure, and vert, a pall [with the upper arms oddly bowed] argent.  I do not recall ever seeing a real coat of arms with a design like this.  Still, at least it's not a blank shield (of any shape).  (The pattern done in the brickwork is visually interesting, too.)

On the Road Again

We recently took a little trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana followed by a drive up to the little town of Charlotte, Michigan, where my family lived fifty years ago.  We were attending the Federation of Genealogy Societies annual conference in Fort Wayne, and then went to Charlotte to do some family history research.  (My father used to write a column in the local weekly newspaper, but he didn't keep copies of them.  Admittedly, his columns were written on a manual typewriter, and carbon paper would have been the only option to do so.  I learned a while back that the local library kept bound copies of the paper and would allow me access to them as well as permit me to photograph and/or scan them.  Having done that now, I've got a huge digitization project facing me.)

Anyway, this trip was a great opportunity to once again confirm my long-standing belief that you can find heraldry everywhere, even in towns the size of Charlotte, which in the most recent census had just barely over 9,000 people.  ("Salute!")*

Admittedly, not all of the heraldry we found was real coats of arms.  But still, even the faux heraldry serves to illustrate that the use of coat armor is alive and well.

So let me share what I ran across in our travels, good, bad, and indifferent.

First up is the first piece of faux heraldry I saw, directly across the street from the Fort Wayne convention center, on the facade of the Embassy Hotel.

As you can see, the "shield" is blank, but it is otherwise organized very much like a complete achievement of arms, with a human face taking the place of helm and crest and a foliate design with flowers serving as mantling.  The shield is being supported by two bird-winged wyverns resting atop a "gas bracket" compartment.  There are also two pelicans atop a pair of columns vulning themselves in the upper corners of the rectangle containing the achievement.

It's a wonderful bit of carving (several identical panels ran across two sides of the hotel) and architectural decoration, but I find it a real shame that the shields are blank when it would have been so easy to carve a real coat of arms there.


* For my foreign readers, that's a line from the old TV show "Hee Haw," which would name some usually small town in America, give its population size, and then everyone in the cornfield would salute while saying "Salute!"

Some Heraldry-like Items in Vicksburg, Mississippi

Not all of the “heraldry” I saw during my brief hour in Vicksburg was very heraldic. Here we have a rendition of the seal of the State of Indiana.

It’s not even a terribly good landscape, and is certainly not good heraldry. Here’s a drawn version of it in color that might be easier to make out (and which also makes that galloping bison a lot less prominent).

A similar quasi-heraldic item that I ran across in Vicksburg was the seal of the State of Ohio.

It's another landscape, and is also not good heraldry. Below is a color rendition for comparison.