Langton Lineage
A Coat of Arms is sometimes also called a FAMILY SHIELD, CODE OF ARMS, FAMILY SEAL OR FAMILY CREST. They are passed down from generation to generation, and changes occur over time, usually as a result of a marriage into the family. They are a useful tool for identifying a family's origin.
Seals, were also used, wax often red was appended to a document, then impressed or stamped with a ring or implement which left a distinct mark. Often the mark was a version of the family shield. It therefore acted as an enhanced signature because it couldn't simply be forged. Hence the monarch had a seal and there was an office Keeper of the Great Seal.
Sometimes these seals on letters were as you see in the movies, neat and fairly small, though sometimes these seals were large, the ball of wax with the impressed seal, hanging from documents via an additional piece of thick paper. Occastionally these wax seals were the size of a hand.
Due to the number of Langton coat of arms from the various branches, it was necesary to separate them out into seperate pages to stop the article being too large, listed below are the main branch pages, which contain the sub locations of the junior branches as listed. Click the page you wish to see.
All pages are working documents, and will continue to be updated as more information comes to light. If you have any information to share, please do get in contact!
Originally, Heraldry was used on the battlefield to help distinguish people, as everyone looked much the same in their armour.
The system by which the coats of arms were designed became ever more complex and resulted in families coats of arms changing over time, usually it was the case that each son of the family added something to the inherited coats of arms to distinguish himself from his relatives. When two families married you sometimes got an amalgamation of the coats of arms, or one family displayed the other coat of arms alongside their own. When two families married together this usually happened only if you inherited from the other family, by perhaps marrying an heiress, or if you married into a very highly ranked family.
Wikipedia has a lot of useful information on Heraldry, so if you are interested in this please visit the link below.
Heraldry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraldry
We hope to be able to link the various Y chromosome DNA results to coats of arms, so that you can use your DNA test results to identify which coat of arms are yours! We do need your help with this though, we need your DNA results, check out the DNA articles here.