02-18-2014, 11:11 PM
Mostly Anglo-Saxon, my family has lived in the N.W. region of the UK for centuries and probably since pre conquest times. There's a hint of Welsh and a flavour of Irish. Some German and trace elements of Lithuanian.
I'm a keen genealogist and can trace my ancestors on my paternal side to a progenitor, a blacksmith, who local legend has it, dressed in the skin of a freshly slaughtered ox and lay in wait for a Griffin which had been terrorizing the local villages by swooping down and carrying off livestock and even children.
He killed the Griffin and was ennobled as a reward. The family thereafter displayed a black griffin rampant on a white filed as their coat of arms, a device which was eventually adopted in to the heraldry of my home town when it was incorporated in 1876.
I'm a keen genealogist and can trace my ancestors on my paternal side to a progenitor, a blacksmith, who local legend has it, dressed in the skin of a freshly slaughtered ox and lay in wait for a Griffin which had been terrorizing the local villages by swooping down and carrying off livestock and even children.
He killed the Griffin and was ennobled as a reward. The family thereafter displayed a black griffin rampant on a white filed as their coat of arms, a device which was eventually adopted in to the heraldry of my home town when it was incorporated in 1876.