While I will never fault someone for wanting to discover where they come from, I will admit that I don't understand the draw of family lineage. Granted my immediate family never put too much stock into our personal heritage for it to really be a big thing in my life. My dad is the second generation born in America for Polish and Slovakian immigrants and my mom is roughly third generation Irish with a tinge of German, I think. My siblings and I will occasionally like to blame a Nationality for a fault in our genetics or piece of faulty logic, but that's about the closest any of us really come to embracing any piece of our muttness. I know there's quite a few family historians on my mom's side who have dedicated many hours trying to find out what part of Ireland the Ross or the Ryans came from originally but I've never cared enough to find out. In the end I just find the idea that you get some validation of who you are by finding the roots of your ancestors to be kind of silly. Why would finding out that you happened to be "related" to George Washington because a second nephew had a bastard with your great-great grandmother (or whatever that would have to be) expand how you see yourself? What happens to those novice genealogists that spend years digging through records looking for family ties, when they hit those eventual dead ends of ancestors being found on a church step in the middle of the night? Again if these searches bring meaning to your existence, I can't really fault you for it since it's a lot of dedication and passion that drives them. I just can't say I get why you do it.
Now that my rant against those god-awful ancestry.com commercials is out of the way, I can now get onto what drove it. Looking at tonight's sticker I was really reminded of family crests or coats of arms that you will typically find on those genealogy maps people create. What I find interesting about the family crest and especially the coat of arms is the fact that most people don't actually have one. Sure your surname may have been tied to one years ago, but the coat of arms was always given to an individual and not necessarily to a family. And even in those family cases, it would only apply to the eldest male and his eventual lineage. Also depending on the country, there is a question of whether or not you can legally lay claim or use one of these crests. So all of those sites claiming to research and find your family crest are generally a crock, not that I'm terribly surprised. But just because you aren't tied to an old one, doesn't mean you don't have the right to create a new one for your family. Each symbol, color, and design hold a significant meaning to the crest and the individual who carries it. If you interpret the symbolism in the sticker using the some of the sites out there, you come up with a very powerful story. The yellow or "gold" in the background is typically associated with generosity and elevation of the mind while the red generally is a symbol of military strength. The cross pattée and the sword are used to signify military service or honour while the crown I would say is closer to the duke symbol than the royal authority one. So an impressive military man who has risen up the ranks to earn himself a dukedom, who apparently really likes tennis shoes since that is really the main focus of the emblem. I'll admit that I'm reading far too much into the symbolism of the sticker, it's more likely someone wanted to make a cool design and felt these pieces fit together. But looking at the significance and the symbolism of these old pieces of imagery is rather a fascinating rabbit hole to fall down into.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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