ANSTHRLD - Fwd: [Fwd: Coats of Arms in Ireland and from around the world]

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

Please don't mail an entire Web page to the list!  The URL alone,
    http://homepage.tinet.ie/~donnaweb/
suffices.

I went to the site.  It's a well-done armorial: you get a page of
mini-emblazons (one page per initial letter of a surname), and if you
click on a mini, you go to a large version.  A few of them link to
external Web pages with further info.

The problems I see are

- Almost every coat is identified only by surname.  In the English,
  and hence Irish, system, a coat of arms is originally borne by only
  one person, and his eldest son is the only one who inherits it
  undifferenced.  Listing a coat with just a surname leads to the
  "bucket shop" fraud.

  In fact, looking further, he advertises a "full coat of arms
  search".  He never says "I'll send you stuff about your family coat
  of arms", but rather things like "text list of coars of arms for the
  surname ... you specify".  However, the uneducated reader will not
  know about the caveat above and will assume that "I'm a Murphy,
  therefore this is my coat of arms".

- There is no supporting documentation: no names of known bearers, no
  dates, nada.

  Looking further, you can get reports with all the info he has
  ... for $6 and up.

- A few have lousy art.  Click under "N" and look at the O'Neill
  design, then go to the external page and see their better design.

It has *some* initial use for starting research, but not that great a
source.

-- 
Tim McDaniel is tmcd at jump.net; if that fail,
    tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work account.
"To join the Clueless Club, send a followup to this message quoting everything
up to and including this sig!" -- Jukka.Korpela at hut.fi (Jukka Korpela)
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