On 16 Sep 2010 at 10:32, Roy Stockdill wrote: > 2) The College of Arms, while certainly an ancient genealogical body, > is not infallible! It was the College that instituted the much-vaunted > Heralds' Visitations, which I have always regarded with some suspicion > as to their 100 per cent accuracy. Let's remember that the Heralds who > were calling on "gentleman" claiming a right to arms, by and large, > accepted what the applicant told them. How much independent evidence > did they assess? I have also had my suspicions that the applicant > would wine and dine them right royally and that even on the odd > occasion a plain brown envelope might have exchanged hands! > I might add to the above by quoting from Mark Herber's book Ancestral Trails - widely regarded as a defining work on genealogy and perhaps the most comprehensive yet. Herber says in a section on the College of Arms, on page 629: "Much of the information submitted to the Heralds was oral tradition of the family (sometimes unreliable) backed up by monuments in the local church or documents in family archives." Which illustrates my point, I think. I equate the kind of "oral tradition" evidence given to the Heralds as akin to that shown in a recent WDYTYA? programme when an actor of African extraction was apparently given oral tradition of his ancestors - precisely the same sort of thing that happened with the "Roots" phenomenon instigated by the American author Alex Haley in the 1960s who claimed to have traced his ancestry back to an 18th century slave in The Gambia. This was widely regarded even by American genealogists as being fanciful and unreliable. On its most basic level, oral tradition can be as simple as great-aunt Maud claiming her grandfather was sired by the lord of the manor who had his wicked way with gt-gt- grandma, a kitchen maid! By all means we should listen to oral tradition, but on a scale of genealogical evidence I wouldn't give it more than about 2-3 out of 10. -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE