Description: A History Blog Specializing In American History
The following is a guest blog from a contributor to the Coat of Arms Database . For more information, please read below.
A surprising number of us have at least one noble ancestor.
Actually, this shouldn’t be surprising. There was only so much land to go around, so over the centuries, some family lines quietly slipped down the social scale. More significantly, male aristocrats were the rock stars of their day. Up until Victorian times, great houses considered children born “on the wrong side of the sheet” to be an asset rather than a liability – it’s handy to have family members who aren’t in the line of succession and yet owe everything to the family.