On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 21:05:04 -0500, "Liane Fenimore" <lfenimore@columbus.rr.com> wrote: >I am curious about your reply regarding the Herald's Visitations. I know >that about a dozen +/- have been published. Are there many more still in >existence? The Harleian Society, a charity founded in 1869 to transcribe, print and publish heraldic visitations of counties, parish registers or any manuscripts relating to genealogy, family history and heraldry, has published over 120 Heraldic Visitations. Because of its early start, most of its publications are now out of print, rare and expensive to purchase on the secondhand book market. Recently, in association with Archive CD Books, these volumes have been reissued on CD-ROM. They are listed on the Harleian Society web site at: http://harleian.co.uk/ Select the option: 'Back Copies of Harleian Society Volumes ' and look at both the Visitation Series and New Series. Heraldic Visitations were also published by others, such as F W Weaver (Somerset 1531, 1573 (1885) and Herefordshire 1569 (1886)) and W C Metcalfe (Buckinghamshire 1566 (1883), Gloucestershire 1682-3 (1884) and Northamptonshire 1564, 1618-9 (1887)). I am not aware of any reprints of these 19th century publications. Lists of published visitations are given in Cecil Humphrey-Smith's 'Armigerous Ancestors' (1997) and also in an article in the 1994 edition of Keith A Johnson's and Malcolm R Sainty's 'Genealogical Research Directory'. The latter includes the LDS film numbers of many of the published items. >Do you know why the Bucks Visitation was not published? The College of Arms holds the original manuscripts of all the Heraldic Visitations and has a policy of not publishing any, because it considers them to be resources solely for its own research. So all publications use the many manuscript copies of the visitations, created by various people with varying accuracy. The job of publishing visitations is very time consuming involving much collation of the various copies plus other checks. Buckinghamshire visitations published so far are: 1566 (by W C Metcalfe) and 1634 (Harleian Society vol. 58). The 1574-5 Buckinghamshire visitation is quite close in date to the published 1566 visitation and is just one of many not yet published. Cheers, John John Addis-Smith Thurleigh, Bedfordshire, England

Thank you for the reply. It turns out that the university library here has most of the Harleian Society publications - or at least they are listed in their catalog, what's on the shelf may be another matter - and once the students are on holiday I think it would be interesting to go look at them. University libraries that offer a Phd in history often have some interesting stuff. Liane