Heritage Album

Question about heritage and genealogy. Please help.?

My question is, do all surnames lead back to a common heritage/ place of origin regardless of where the ancsetors scatter to. I am confused as to what ties there are between some information that I have found about my last name Gilbert. I have found my Gilbert family dates back to decent from Cornwall England. Also, I have learned that the Gilbert family name is a sept of the Buchanan clan from Scotland. My coat of arms matches that of a website where I learned this information. http://www.houseofnames.com/xq/asp/s.Gilbert/ Origin.EN/sId.844C425A-CFF2-4B26-9338-7D2378909A8E/qx/coatofarms_details.htm Here is what I think, my direct anscestors are from Cornwall, England. After this, I feel that information is to hard to find about the direct lineage of my heritage after this point except for the origin of the Gilbert's which is from Scotland. Is this a reasonable assumption. well the coat of arms is not mine it is owned by my grandfather I just recognized the same image online

Public Comments

1. No, I'm afraid that its not a reasonable assumption. Genealogy is like any other form of research - you cant make assumptions about causality, you have to have proof. You have proof that you are related (in the form of birth certificates, tax records, etc) to someone that you have proof lived in Cornwall, and then you can go from point A to point B. That's the first step. Patience in this field really is a virtue. I used to do medical research - my mother does genealogical research - lemme tell ya, she ends up having to do a lot more work! But good luck and best wishes if you decide to do it!
2. Heritage and genealogy are sometimes not that simple. If you have the money, you might start with your ancestry and the folks from the Human Genome Project have a test that looks at your DNA and can determine where your line originated (if you want to go back that far). The other thing is to go to the earliest date of known family name you have and the community it comes from (or area) and see if there's a genealogy society or heritage society there you can ask for further information they might have. Those guys who sell books on family names do a generic job that may not even match your family history, but it's the name they count on to sell. Research history as well and see if you can find anything on the Bucchanan Clan and where they went..if any went to England and when. Also see if anyone in Birmingham has info you can't find that might lead you in the direction most helpful. Again, heritage societies, libraries and genealogical associations. Those folks love to dig and collect info.
3. It would appear that standard genealogical research would be your best bet, one generation at a time. One who inherits a "coat of arms" from one's father is already certain of noble descent. The stuff people buy for their walls and coffee mugs is for the commercial trade.
4. Here's the flaw in your logic. First, I don't know where you got the "coat of arms", but if it wasn't passed down to you from the last 15 generations of your ancestors, it isn't authentic. It isn't even appropriate for you to use it. A coat of arms was granted to one single man. He passed it as part of his estate to his eldest son...and to no one else. It was possible for him to sell it, but that would be an act of desperation. For anyone other than the eldest son of the eldest son...of the eldest son to claim this as a "family coat of arms" is erroneous. It is heraldry and passes only to one person. If you're not that descendent of the original recipient of the honor, it's not yours to claim. People came up with the idea of a "family coat of arms" by confusing it with a clan tartan that came out of Ireland and Scotland. Coats of arms are not the possession of a family, though. But back in the 1950s an enterprising man in Bath Ohio found a way to capitalize on the confusion between coats of arms and tartan plaids and start selling tzatches to people who didn't know better. He went out and found every man to whom these honors were given, matched them up with the surnames of their descendents (as surnames didn't exist at the time these honors were being awarded) and he started selling them along with phonied up family histories. My parents fell for it...and even though my dad knew he was German/Polish, they paid $15 for a piece of paper and a wall plaque that says the family actually came from Belgium. But it didn't. House of Names is a sham. I'm sorry to be blunt, but people around here are using it all the time as a "credible resource" and it's not. They are in business to sell plastic "stuff" to people in the name of genealogy and there's nothing to prove that their pedigree information has any basis in reality. Want to know the truth about the name Gilbert? It's a patrynomic surname and it popped up all over the British Isles and France. Gilbert/Guilbert was a man's name. There were no surnames in that region 700 years ago. Someone came up with the idea of making it easier to identify one man with a given first name from every other man with that first name. So they created surnames. There were 4 ways for surnames to be picked (geographic, occupational, religious/patron saint, or patrynom...a play off of the first name of their father). Gilbert was a man's name. When it came time to identify a family name, they would often take their father's name. They could make it McGilbert or MacGilbert, they could have been "Gilbertson"...or they could keep it simple and just be Gilbert. Everyone with the surname Gilbert does NOT trace back to the same father. There were literally hundreds of Gilberts living in Britain and France whose descendents took that name as a surname. They weren't related to each other...not even cousins. If you want to know the origins of your family, you need to do serious genealogy research. That would involve reviewing wills, going through parish sacramental registers, researching land records, etc. The answer to the question isn't on the internet...it's in archives in Britain or Scotland.
5. Yes.It sounds as if your research is as close to the truth as you can get.
6. The short answer to this is No. By chance, it so happens that Gilbert is one of the surnames that appears in my ancestry. I can link my family to Brainard, Gilbert, and Torrey's "The Gilbert Family: Descendants of Thomas Gilbert, 1582(?)-1659 of Mt. Wollaston (Braintree), Windsor, and Wethersfield." In my opinion, the best approach is to begin with what you can actually document about your near ancestors. See how far back that takes you. See if you can link up with some existing research. Then you will have a better idea where your specific Gilbert family came from.
7. I'm no expert, honestly i started researching my family tree less than an year ago. but, i believe you have reached a reasonable assumption. I have not done much research in coat of arms or even my family history outside of the united states. i do wish you lots of luck.
8. As with the other serious answers to your question, the real answer is "No", a given surname rarely goes back to a single place or family. As has been indicated in several of the other answers anyone who "promotes" that idea along with "crests", "histories", and "pedigrees" is basically in the same category as the emails that you sometimes get telling you that 5 million dollars is waiting for you from Nigeria if you will just let the person know your banking numbers. The good news is that if you have really an authenic trail back to Cornwall, which means basically one of your ancestors having been born in a specific place in Cornwall, then you have some help available. The Cornwall site of the World Genweb program is at this url: www.rootsweb.com/~engcornw/surnames.htm (for some reason the editor cuts of the last bit of the url which should read: surnames.htm , so you will need to add that if you go looking) There are two researchers in Cornwall who have registered their interest in the Gilbert name and both seem to have a fair amount of information. They might be distants cousins if you are lucky but don't count on it. Rootsweb.com, by the way, is one of the best for free genealogy sites on the web and is a good place to start your research into your family.
9. You should not go by coat of arms unless you are or your ancestor was the 7th son you have no rights to the coat of arms most people just expect they can use the coat of arms because the carry that surname but that is not so. As for the surname Gilbert it could be from a saint it maybe of Anglo-Saxon origins Its a common surname so most people who carry it will not have any reltionship to one another what so ever you should try and find a Gilbert DNA project to determine your exact geographical origins and which Gilbert clan you belong to.