Heraldry & Genealogy
“You can have genealogy without heraldry but you can’t have heraldry without genealogy”, said Dr. Rolf Sutter at the RootsTech 2015 in Salt Lake City.
And – it always has to do with family!
And experience shows us that heraldry is often the initial approach to family research. Much of our research work begins with the endowment of a family coat-of-arms. In most cases, once a family has its own coat-of-arms, a totally new feeling for family matters emerges together with the desire to find out more about its past generations. And that is the basis for genealogical research. Things normally begin by the family looking at the present generation and taking down dates and documenting names. One very important step in the research is to question older members of the family who can remember who was who, and where, and when! Such knowledge from still-living relatives is an enormous and valuable source of information which will dry up when they pass on. Many family stories and anecdotes have never been written down and exist still only in the memory of living relatives.