New! And Improved!

Well, okay, to be honest, it isn't really new.

And, frankly, although it is improved some, it's not really improved all that much.

With that disclaimer, over the past week I have been updating my American Heraldry Collection with an additional source of historical arms used in what is now the United States of America.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society has recently digitized and uploaded to their website five of the original volumes in a New Database: Roll of Arms Registered by the NEHGS, 1915-1945. This series of images is of the originally drawn and blazoned arms of the first 378 coats of arms registered by the Committee on Heraldry. Though the names, blazons, and line drawings of these arms (as well as the other 363 which have been registered since 1945) have been published in the book A Roll of Arms available for sale on the NEHGS website's bookstore, I have found that being able to see the original color paintings of the arms was helpful in deciphering some of the blazons where I had a question about what exactly was meant, and was thus able to revise the blazons in my American Heraldry Collection to be more accurate.

Anyway, having reviewed all 378 coats in this new NEHGS database and either confirmed (in the majority of cases) or modified their blazons, or added information from this database as a new entry (and sometimes being able to combine a couple of separate entries into a single unified one), I have updated and uploaded the New and Improved™ American Heraldry Collection so that if you are interested, you can download it for your own use.

It's in a .zip file that contains two documents: a .docx file that gives some background on the Collection as well as a key to all of the sources used; and a .xlsx file that contains all of the blazons of the arms and crests, and the sources for, each surname.

The Collection can always be downloaded by clicking on the link labeled "American Heraldry Collection" in the left-hand column of this blog under the Heading "Some Articles I Have Written".

Or, if you simply cannot wait to do it by scrolling down a little, it can be found here: www.appletonstudios.com/American_Heraldry_Collection.zip

Enjoy!

An Update!

This is just a quick announcement to let you know that over this weekend I have:

1 - Found a new source for some more coats of arms used in the United States;

2 - Added those arms to my Excel spreadsheet of arms used in the United States; and

3 - Uploaded that Excel spreadsheet, with its accompanying Word document (which gives some background, explanation, and bibliography of the sources used in creating the spreadsheet), combined into a .zip file, to the internet.

This time I have not, as I have in the past, uploaded two versions, one .xlsx and one .xls. Only the .xlsx/.docx version has been uploaded. Most folks who are interested in these documents can open and read them as they are, and for those who can't, there are a number of websites out there who will convert them - for free! - into just about any format you want, not just .xls and .doc.

So, there you have it! If you would like the latest version, there is a link to the .zip file in the left-hand column of this blog under "Some Articles I've Written". The link is labeled "American Heraldry Collection (in .xlsx and .docx)".

Enjoy!

A Newly-Digitized Heraldic Research Tool

For those of you who know of the four-volume set Dictionary of British Arms: Medieval Ordinary, you know it's a great set of books, but one which may be a bit beyond many budgets. There is some recent good news about this set of books.

OAPEN, Open Access Publishing in European Networks, has digitized and uploaded all four volumes of the Dictionary of British Arms and these books can be downloaded from their website.

You can visit the OAPEN website and see these digitized books at http://oapen.org/search?title=dictionary+of+british+arms&creator=&orcid=&serie.title=&subject=&isbn=&doi=&grantors=&grantors=&grantors=&collections=&pubdate=&pubdate-max=&smode=advanced, or go to the OAPEN Library main page at http://oapen.org/content/, click on "advanced search options", and in the Metadata box, type "dictionary of british arms" in the "Title" field, and then hit the "Search" button.

I have also added the first link above to the section "Some Good On-Line Armorials" in the left-hand column of this blog, so you should always be able to find the link, even if you can't remember which blog post it's in.

Enjoy!

A Big Heraldry Project Completed

I have posted the following announcement on the Facebook pages of several of the heraldry societies to which I belong, but in case you are reading this here and have not seen it on Facebook, here it is:

Finally! At long last, it is done! Nearly three years ago I began to collect into a single document personal heraldry (coats of arms and crests) as used in what is now the United States of America, from a number of different collections. I did this because I sometimes found myself having to look through three, four, five or more different books (some .pdf, some hard copy) when trying to research a coat of arms used here, and I wanted be able to have a handy single source to do this research. I think it's finally ready for use, and consists of 9,990 separate entries.

Now that it is completed, I can share my work with others who may also find it useful, without having to recreate it from scratch.

I have uploaded two .zip files to my website, Appleton Studios. One contains a .docx and a .xlsx file: the first is an explanatory document giving the collection's rationale, with an explanation of my attempt to make the blazons consistent, along with a bibliography of the sources I've used and a key to those sources (so read this document first!); the second is the actual collection with surname, blazon of the arms, blazon of the crest (if given in the source), and the source of each. This .zip file can be downloaded directly from the Appleton Studios website at http://www.appletonstudios.com/American Heraldry Collection (xlsx version).zip.

Because I know that not everyone can open Microsoft's .docx and .xlsx files, I have also saved each file as a .doc and .xls file. The .xls may be slightly more limited in how it can be manipulated, but contains all of the same data, and really, that's what's important, right? The zipped .doc and .xls files can be downloaded at http://www.appletonstudios.com/American Heraldry Collection (xls version).zip.

Both files can also be downloaded from links on the "What's New" page (http://www.appletonstudios.com/whatsnew.htm) and the "Free Stuff" page (http://www.appletonstudios.com/freestuff.htm) on the website.

If you find these files useful, great! If you find an error (or errors; I don't claim to have caught every single typo or other mistake (as I often say, "I am a prefect tpyist; I never make mistrakes"), though I have tried very hard to find and fix them), please email me and let me know so I can correct it (or them) and upload the corrected files. And, of course, if you find another source which blazons personal arms used in the United States that is not included in this collection, let me know about that, too, so they can be added and the collection updated.

Check These Out!

The very nice people over at Heraldíca Nova, in their on-going quest to continuously update their Digitized Armorials list, have recently added another nineteen (count 'em! Nineteen!) armorials to that listing.

I could spend a lot of time copying pictures from some of these armorials, and then spend more time discussing each of them in turn,

OR

You could simply click on the link below and see them for yourself.

Since the latter is what you're going to want to do anyway, I vote for the latter.

So if you want to take at look at these digitized armorials for your research (and many of them are downloadable to your computer, so you can even go through them without having to be on-line), or if you simply like looking at pretty pictures of heraldry and coats of arms, go visit this post on Heraldíca Nova at http://heraldica.hypotheses.org/4785

You'll be glad you did!

Don't Forget!

A recent correspondent had requested I send him a list of good heraldry reference books as well as a list of rare but especially nice to have heraldry books. In my reply, I noted that I wasn't including a number of volumes which I thought were very good but which had been digitized and were available for free on the internet. My rationale was that, while some of these were very nice, could they really be considered as "rare," since they were freely available to anyone who looked for them.

In any case, he asked me to send him a list of some of these, and I realized that I actually had the ones I was thinking of listed here on the blog, under the sections "Some Good On-Line Armorials and Ordinaries" and "Some Good On-Line Heraldry Books."

So today's post is just a short reminder: be sure to check out the links down the left-hand side of this blog. There are some real jewels of heraldry and heraldic art linked there, and you might find it of interest to check at least some of them out.

As I was creating my list to send to my correspondent, I did find one link that no longer worked. I have updated that link (to John Guillim's A Display of Heraldrie) so that it takes you to the book, where it can be read on-line or downloaded for looking at later.  I will continue to update links which no longer work as I find them.

Thanks for dropping by, and don't forget to check out the links here!

Another Interesting Digitized Armorial

I ran across another armorial which has been scanned and uploaded on-line the other day. This one struck me particularly because it is actually a little less about the heraldry and a little more about the individuals who bore them.

Each coat of arms comes with a full-length portrait of its bearer, as in the illustration of one page from the armorial here:

It's always interesting to me to see the different ways in which such books of arms are done, and this one is a particularly fine example of this.

If you happen to be interested in German mid-16th Century costuming (I'm not, myself, but still...), it's a great resource for that, as well.

It also contains, as many armorials from this time period do, a number of attributed arms, e.g., Alexander Magnus (Alexander the Great), Azure three bells or.

The armorial is Das Sächsische Stammbuch - Mscr.Dresd.R.3, dated 1546, which has been digitized and uploaded on the website of the SLUB Dresden. The page (translated into English) at which you can view, browse through, and download individual pages or the entire book, is at http://digital.slub-dresden.de/en/workview/dlf/56803/?tx_dlf%5Bpointer%5D=2&cHash=2342d25fedf9da8e1ae7d8221ee3c5d4 The link to the page in German is shorter: http://digital.slub-dresden.de/en/workview/dlf/56803/1/0/

I have also saved a link to it in the "Some Good On-Line Armorials and Ordinaries" section down the left-hand side of this blog, so it will always be here for you.

Enjoy!

Psst! Hey, Buddy!

Yeah, you.  You wanna get some free downloads of some early French armorials?  Naw, this is the real deal, I'm tellin' ya.  Sure they're high res.  What else would they be?  Oh, yeah, I remember some of those early ones.  Well, those days are past.  This stuff is primo.  Take my word for it.  Trust me!

Seriously, it sometimes pays to go back and revisit web pages that I've looked at before, because the web is not static, and things can - and do - improve.

In this particular instance, it was a post from way back in December 31, 2012, on La langue du blason, a French-language blog that I visit periodically.  I'd kept track of this post because it had links to several early French armorials digitized and uploaded by the French National Library (BNF), but for some reason, while all of the links worked for me, the BNF site would only let me download some of the armorials linked, and not others.  And frankly, I like to be able to download such things to my hard drive so that I can research them at my leisure without having to go on-line.  It's particularly useful if I'm traveling, where I might not always have a good internet connection, and I can copy them to an external hard drive and look at them on my netbook wherever I happen to be, with or without an internet connection.

So I was thrilled to find that the BNF has added some new features to their website, and that when I clicked the link from La langue du blason to the BNF page for a particular armorial, there was another link there in English that said "Test the future version of Gallica and discover its simplified viewer.  View this document in Gallica Labs."  So I did, and I was able to download each armorial without any difficulty at all!  For example, here's a page of arms from Brabant in a Rôle d'armes du voyage d'Outre-mer ou Rôle d'armes de Gaignières (BNF Ms Fr 23077):

Cool, huh?  Want to see, or download, some of these rolls of arms yourself?  Check out the links on this page from La langue du blason at http://lalanguedublason.blogspot.com/2012/12/nouveaux-armoriaux-en-ligne-sur-gallica.html#more

Enjoy!  I certainly intend to do so with the ones I have now been able to add to the French armorials on my hard drive.