The year that the profits of Timothy Rasher's pork-packing business first exceeded $20,000, his wife pestered him to purchase a new home better befitting the family's social status. Before the furnishings could be procured for the handsome Italic brownstone on New York's Fifth Avenue, however, there was another matter to be settled. “Don't you know whether any of the Rashers in the old country ever had a coat-of-arms?” Mrs. Rasher asked her husband, “You might consult the Book of Heraldry an’ find out, because if there was, it will be just the thing to have our armorial bearings blazing on all our plate an’ things an’ our escullion [sic] hanging over the hall-door.” Mr. Rasher responded by hastily designing his own coat of arms, a hog on a white shield with the motto Salve Lardum, or “save your bacon.” Sceptical at first, Mrs. Rasher accepted the explanation that some of Europe's noblest families had wild boars on their devices, and the newly minted chatelaine promptly had the arms engraved on her silverware and stencilled on the door of her carriage.Footnote ¹

This story was familiar to thousands of late nineteenth-century Americans who followed the serialized adventures of the fictional Rashers in the columns of their newspapers, or read the digest version, Mrs. Rasher's Curtain Lectures, published in 1884. Plodding, punning caricatures of the pretension and conspicuous consumption of New York's new rich, the Rashers shared with their real-life archetypes a fascination with heraldry as a mark of family respectability. Wealthy Americans during the Gilded Age participated in a “craze for crests”; some traced their genealogies in hopes of asserting a right to an existing European coat of arms, while others, like the Rashers, simply designed their own. The display of family crests, dismissed by bemused contemporaries as the “strange whims of crest fiends,” evolved from a quaint affectation of the northeastern elite into a widespread American cultural practice that transcended regional and class boundaries. Successive generations of heraldic entrepreneurs used a variety of production and marketing strategies to reach ever-greater markets for their publications and memorabilia. The ideas and business practices of heraldic entrepreneurs effected the evolution of the coat of arms in American culture from a high bourgeois mark of social pretension to a common appurtenance of the surname and symbol of popular antimodernism, displayed in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American homes. The circumstances of heraldic production in America have had a profound influence on heraldry's meaning.Footnote ²

This study situates the evolution of American heraldry within the broader democratization of genealogical research, a phenomenon that has attracted considerable attention from scholars. Donald Akenson and Michael Sweeney identify the culturally and historically contingent notions of kinship that underpin contemporary genealogical practice. François Weil argues that early republican Americans viewed pride of ancestry with suspicion, and that genealogy required democratization before it was acceptable to most Americans. Francesca Morgan argues that bourgeois interest in genealogy facilitated this process. Robert Taylor has linked the growth of interest in genealogy to dislocations precipitated by modernity, while Ronald Lambert argues that contemporary genealogists are motivated by a desire to reconcile autobiographical and historical conceptions of time.Footnote ³ Self-definition in response to the uncertainty of modernity is a key element of antimodernist discourse. T. J. Jackson Lears, in his groundbreaking study of antimodernism in American culture, suggests that a fascination with historical or primitive cultural practices helped nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans cope with the social and cultural upheavals of the modern age. These challenges included the intensification of urbanization and industrialization and their attendant social ills; the separation from kin that widespread migration entailed; and the racial and ethnic anxieties precipitated by mass immigration, African American emancipation and colonial encounters in the American West. As scholars have observed elsewhere in the Anglosphere, heraldry was and remains one of many expressions of interest in the medieval past, and although direct evidence of the antimodernist motivations of consumers is hard to come by, heraldic and genealogical marketers appear to have capitalized on a desire for refuge from modernity.Footnote ⁴ Certainly genealogy – and heraldry – quickly became enmeshed in broader consumer culture. Both Morgan and Weil observe that nineteenth-century genealogy was a commercial as well as a filiopietistic pursuit, but although Ronald Bishop suggests that genealogy is an acquisitive hobby – genealogists “collect” ancestors as philatelists collect postage stamps – there has been little discussion of the material dimension of genealogical research. A growing body of scholarship in consumer studies, however, points to the importance of possessions as mnemonic devices that define personal and familial identities.Footnote ⁵

Like family trees and family bibles, the family crest is a visual – and sometimes tangible – representation of genealogical identity, and its meaning is contingent and contested. Several historians of American genealogical practice have acknowledged a relationship between heraldic and genealogical consumption. Elisa Tamarkin argues that interest in both genealogy and heraldry suggests a preoccupation with unity in the midst of the pre-Civil War sectional crisis. Morgan notes the importance of heraldry as an antimodernist auxiliary discipline to genealogical research and emphasizes its perceived connection to nobility. Weil acknowledges that heraldry enjoyed a niche following within the broader genealogical marketplace after the Civil War, but dismisses later developments. “The battle for an American science of heraldry was lost,” he writes. “Coats of arms proliferated without justification throughout the late nineteenth century.” The limited historiography of American heraldry thus emphasizes its antimodernism, its transatlantic and aristocratic connotations, and its ultimate departure from European antecedents, which Weil presents as its failure.Footnote ⁶

However, slavishly replicating European practice was not the objective of American heraldic entrepreneurs, and heraldry's relationship with genealogy was more complicated than Weil's interpretation suggests. The commercial refashioning of heraldry was not unique to the United States.Footnote ⁷ However, its American manifestation is particularly interesting given the putative inconsistency of aristocracy and its trappings with American egalitarian republicanism. A growing body of scholarship elucidates the ambivalent cultural relationship between the nineteenth-century United States and Europe, especially Great Britain. Even as post-Revolutionary Americans sought to refashion their society and polity in opposition to European precedents, the most well-to-do among them bristled at British and European condescension and emulated in their consumer culture the very aristocratic model they rejected politically.Footnote ⁸ For the antebellum bourgeoisie, the problem of defining a class identity led some to fixate on manner and “sincerity,” while others became fascinated with aristocracy and monarchy; rejection of these institutions as political actors did not preclude interest in them as models for American celebrity culture.Footnote ⁹ From the purchase of fashionable European housewares to vicarious association with foreign nobility, the American middle class's relationship with European culture was subject to fierce criticism, which in turn was met with spirited defence. Refinement and “gentility” were inherently political, and although much of the scholarship on this subject focuses on the antebellum period, the history of American heraldry suggests that the tension persisted well into the twentieth century.

To many Americans, the display of a coat of arms was explicitly aristocratic, more so than ownership of a Wedgwood dinner service or a Louis XVI chair. Its connotations of status made heraldry appealing for the high bourgeoisie, but it was also an easy target for their detractors. Therefore, just as genealogists “Americanized” their field for political reasons, heraldry was adapted to appeal to a broad consumer base. Examining the circumstances of the production of family crests reveals how the medium and its content evolved to fit the demands of the free market and of democracy. The display of coats of arms not only connoted un-American social pretension, as critics such as the author of Mrs. Rasher's Kitchen Lectures seemed to suggest; it could also reflect and legitimize new ideas about genealogy and kinship. Like other aspects of bourgeois consumer culture, the commercialization of heraldry made possible its popularization across class lines, but in doing so its meaning and its relation to genealogy changed.Footnote ¹⁰ As this article demonstrates, the popular belief that a coat of arms belongs to all persons with a particular surname, and that nearly every surname has a crest associated with it, can be traced to the marketing strategies of heraldic entrepreneurs. In seeking to make the practices of European gentry attractive to a wide audience, American heraldic entrepreneurs transformed those practices and created a new heraldic tradition. The marketing of heraldry in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States epitomizes the uneasy relationship between refinement and republicanism, and their eventual reconciliation in consumer culture.

The European heraldic tradition that Gilded Age Americans initially sought to emulate was centuries old by the Rashers' day. Born of the necessity to distinguish friend from foe on the medieval battlefield or tournament ground, heraldry evolved over the succeeding centuries into a complex system of visual identification, inextricably entwined with concepts of kinship, property and social status. Three characteristics distinguish coats of arms from other emblematic forms: the medieval knight's shield as a canvass, strict design conventions regulating the colour and placement of charges, and a specialized legal corpus governing the use and inheritance of arms. European laws of arms varied considerably in their provisions for the acquisition of arms. In the British Isles, for example, the granting of arms was a Crown prerogative, while in France or Germany a man could freely assume a coat of arms of his own design. Throughout western Europe, however, coats of arms were the property of their grantees or original users and their direct descendants. It is in the separation of the heraldic emblem from a documented genealogical narrative of descent and its use by all persons of the same surname that the contemporary American “family crest” differs most significantly from the western European coat of arms.Footnote ¹¹

The first colonists in America brought heraldic devices with them and developed new ones. Interest did not abate after the Revolution, and even the grand federal processions organized to celebrate the 1787 ratification of the Constitution featured heraldic displays. Although these uses were precedents for the crest craze of the late nineteenth century, interest in heraldry during the Gilded Age far exceeded that in earlier decades.Footnote ¹² Libraries were unable to keep heraldic and genealogical works on the shelves, and publishers released heraldic treatises specifically aimed at American audiences. Newspapers distilled these treatises into brief primers on heraldic convention and vocabulary; therefore many readers of Mrs. Rasher's exploits could have chuckled at her uncouth confusion of “escutcheon,” a heraldic shield, with “escullion,” a household servant. Manufacturers of cutlery, stationery and other consumer goods applied customer's family crests to their wares. Even family dogs were caught up in the fervour, tattooed with their owner's crests to deter thieves. Emanating as it did from the northeastern cities, the heraldry craze provoked mild disapproval from western papers bemused by the affectations of the effete east. Nevertheless, the craze was not confined to northeastern cities; well-to-do Americans in many regions emulated easterners in their use of heraldic insignia.Footnote ¹³

Weil suggests that the association of lineage with social status motivated eighteenth-century American genealogy but that this approach fell from favour during the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the craze for crests indicates that status remained an important motivator for genealogical and heraldic interest during the Gilded Age. Crest fiends and their critics alike recognized that the family crest was a powerful tool of social definition and differentiation. For a self-made industrialist like Timothy Rasher, heraldry suggested ancient values of chivalry and family lineage, simultaneously legitimizing his wealth and obscuring its distasteful source. Thorstein Veblen, the keenest contemporary critic of early twentieth-century consumer culture, saw heraldic devices as modern elaborations of primitive “trophies of exploit,” emblematic of the appropriation of the productive labour of others. This European system of trophies naturalized the privatization of the commons and the exploitative labour practices that characterized the Gilded Age. The use of heraldry was closely linked to other social practices that defined Veblen's leisure class. It is no accident that Mrs. Rasher and her nonfictional archetypes first applied their crests to their silverware; distinctive dining rituals and implements served as markers of social status, as Sven Beckert has noted, and the application of a coat of arms reinforced this role. Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed the inhumane labour practices of meatpacking magnates like Timothy Rasher, noted the affinity between heraldic and culinary ostentation in his lesser-known work The Metropolis. At his first New York dinner party, Sinclair's protagonist, Mississippian Allan Montague, finds that his hostess's coat of arms not only adorns her automobile and her liquor decanters, but is also branded into “the delicately browned sweetbread.” Conspicuous consumption and interest in heraldry were mutually reinforcing phenomena.Footnote ¹⁵

As a marker of class, the coat of arms was a shrewd selection. On the one hand, it is a simple and instantly recognizable form. Alongside its obvious connotations of antiquity and nobility, its long-standing use by educational institutions, governments and the military made heraldry a powerful signifier of authority and credibility, even in the republican United States. When Judge R. B. Tappan of Alameda, California sealed a 1904 summons with the armorial bearings of the Spanish captain-general of the Philippines, he demonstrated this aspect of heraldry's attractiveness: the heraldic form alone conveyed authority, and its symbolic content was irrelevant. Anthropologist Alfred Gell envisages this phenomenon, proposing that art objects index the agency of their makers and owners even if their meaning, in the semiotic sense, is obscure. Indeed, its very esotericism also accounts for heraldry's appeal. To the uninitiated, this complex system of colours, symbols, and conventions seems an impenetrable secret code, with a mystical capacity to convey historical or genealogical information. Heraldry is thus an “occult science,” and its mastery, according to Veblen, is an immaterial marker of the “life of leisure.”Footnote ¹⁶

Precisely because of its connotations of aristocratic status and authority, the use of heraldry elicited considerable criticism on patriotic grounds. “We are pretty sure that ‘Americans’ is not the right name for them,” concluded one New York Times columnist's assessment of the clientele of a proposed American heraldic college. A San Francisco paper questioned, perhaps facetiously, the loyalty of a local port official who had inherited a British coat of arms, worrying that he might “in the event of war … be fired with hereditary instincts … to strike for the land of his sires.” Even the historical coats of arms that decorated Trinity Church in New York for its 1897 bicentennial struck critics as “effete and monarchical.” Politicians who participated in the crest craze left themselves open to partisan derision. On discovering that New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Roswell P. Flower used a coat of arms, his Republican opponents distributed images of his emblem in an attempt to cast Flower as a plutocrat out of touch with the values and concerns of the electorate. When President Grover Cleveland announced that he would not display a coat of arms on his carriage, he was praised by the Galveston, Texas Daily News for his “good sense and good taste.” Conversely, the decision of Cleveland's Secretary of the Treasury, Daniel Manning, to display a family crest incensed the press. “Mr. Manning has the right to adopt a coat of arms if he chooses,” opined the Milwaukee Sentinel, “But to many people such aping of the old-world aristocracy by Americans seems not a little ridiculous, and we fail to discover in it the Jeffersonian simplicity which we were told would characterize the present administration.” As late as 1951, the Republican Chicago Tribune criticized the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt for having assumed a coat of arms while in office.Footnote ¹⁷

Critics questioned whether heraldry could even exist in a country without a formal heraldic authority. Before 1776, the English College of Arms exercised nominal jurisdiction over heraldry in the Thirteen Colonies, and the founders of one colony – Carolina – attempted to establish a local heraldic court. However, with the exception of an unsuccessful 1867 Congressional motion to tax the use of family crests, the republic showed no interest in the regulation of private coats of arms. For pedantic minds, this made heraldry in America impossible: as one correspondent of the New York Times wrote in 1899, a coat of arms was a gift from a sovereign and had no meaning in a republic. Another correspondent quickly, and correctly, countered that only in Great Britain were coats of arms exclusively honours from the Crown; in continental Europe free assumption was the norm. Even English heraldry offered precedents for self-designed arms, as the Virginia heraldist William Armstrong Crozier pointed out. Why, then, should Americans not follow this convention?Footnote ¹⁸

In displaying a coat of arms of their own design, Mr. and Mrs. Rasher were in good company. The Vanderbilts designed their own arms, as did industrialist Andrew Carnegie, whose shield featured shoemaker's tools to honour his modest roots and a Phrygian cap denoting his democratic allegiance.Footnote ¹⁹ The principle of free assumption offered ample opportunities for free enterprise. The first heraldic entrepreneurs in the United States were probably craftsmen who added heraldic decoration to their regular wares, as in this 1859 satirical poem:

Coach makers did not have a monopoly on arms for the wealthy. The first American heraldic treatise and roll of arms was published by a Philadelphia purveyor of crested stationery, and a New York Sun investigation uncovered a “Hall of Records” that doubled as an antique clock dealership. A specialized College of Heraldry for the United States had been envisaged as early as the 1840s, and by century's end there were several private pretenders to the title, headquartered at home and abroad. The Paris-based American College of Arms offered to design a coat of arms on parchment for a fee of fifty dollars. The college's chief executive, one “Count de Quercize,” claimed to have served as French vice consul at New York, but the consulate denied any knowledge of him. In London, the British-American Heraldry Office infuriated the English College of Arms when it asserted, on the basis of creative legal reasoning, that the college's charter had fallen into abeyance. Sir William Weldon, Norroy King of Arms, sued the American upstarts for libel, but to no avail: the British-American Heraldry Office disappeared before the case could be heard. The College of Heraldry Company Incorporated and the American Genealogical Bureau proved similarly ephemeral.Footnote ²¹

More persistent was the American College of Heraldry and Genealogical Registry. Founded in 1860, the college was the brainchild of one Albert Welles and it was intended to bring order to American heraldry. Contradicting those who believed that armorial display of any sort was a dangerous symptom of aspiring hereditary nobility, Welles noted that symbolic honours, such as military decorations and honorary academic degrees, already existed in America. He looked forward to a day when Congress might award coats of arms, but in the meantime he denounced the practice of free assumption, proposing instead detailed research into the existing European arms to which Americans might be entitled.Footnote ²² As Weil and Morgan have noted, racial anxiety pervaded Victorian genealogical discourse, and Welles's patriotic conception of heraldry and genealogy was steeped in Anglo-Saxonism and biological metaphor. Like the architect Ralph Adams Cram, who saw the English Gothic style as the “vigorous stock” whereupon Americans would “graft” new elements, Welles urged his countrymen to “engraft Genealogy with all its attendant aids … upon our Escutcheons,” to create a new, more perfect heraldry suited to “Saxon America … the Continent of the Future … where mankind may plant, essay, and resolve all social problems.”Footnote ²³ Welles thus hoped to redirect the heraldic impulses of the American high bourgeoisie. More than mere ostentation, their emblems would convey their European heritage but also their American identity. Where Gilded Age crest fiends used heraldry to add a patina of antiquity to their social pretension, Welles used the medium to give authority to his American genealogical project.

From its stately quarters in the New York Society Library building near Washington Square, the American College of Heraldry and Genealogical Registry was prolific in its output. The archives of the college preserved some two hundred manuscript genealogies of prominent New York families. A selection of these, each illustrated with associated coats of arms, appeared in a three-volume American Family Antiquity; families paid as much as two hundred dollars for the privilege of inclusion, and ten dollars each for bound offprints for private circulation.Footnote ²⁴ Unfortunately, Welles did not necessarily practise the disciplined research he advocated. His genealogy of George Washington, which traced the descent of the Revolutionary hero from the Norse god Odin, appears to have initiated the peculiar and persistent custom of preparing fanciful pedigrees of American Presidents.Footnote ²⁵ Another of his works traced the descent of Wall Street banker Washington Connor from Japheth, the son of Noah, via the High Kings of Ireland, and went so far as to attribute Connor's “high order of talent and executive ability” to these illustrious antecedents.Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, one contemporary genealogist characterized Welles's work as “generally unreliable,” while a less charitable reviewer dismissed the college's magazine, the Chronotype, as “a travesty on the work of sober genealogists.”Footnote ²⁷ His genealogies were apparently calculated to serve the vanity of his clients and, perhaps, to assert Americans’ racial superiority on the basis of their biblical and Nordic origins.

The most damning investigation into the work of the college appeared on the front page of the New York Tribune early in 1881. According to this exposé, the college derived both revenue and prestige from the sale of life memberships and seats on its Board of Regents; in return for his contribution of fifty dollars, a member received access to the college records and an emblazonment of his family crest, if Welles and his research department determined that the member was entitled to one. In this manner Welles had apparently raised over $25,000. The physical plant of the grandly named institution consisted of a small room in a state of “wild confusion.”Footnote ²⁸ As the Tribune story spread, regional papers revelled in the embarrassment of Welles's former clients. “The poor fools forget that aristocracy is an exotic in this country, and that the hard-working, practical American people are laughing at their quixotic exhibitions,” teased a Texas editor.Footnote ²⁹ Welles died two years later and the public response to the sale of his records was disappointing. Manuscript pedigrees sold at auction for as little as fifteen cents. The corporate identity of the college, including its own trademarked coat of arms, garnered the princely sum of $2.50.Footnote ³⁰ A mahogany bookcase and three office tables rounded out the shabby chattels of the aspiring temple of American genealogy.

To Weil, Welles's career illustrates the irreversible degeneration of American heraldic practice. However, Welles might instead be cast as an unwitting progenitor of an American heraldic tradition that melded the venal capitalism of the Gilded Age with a conviction that heraldry could and should be Americanized. His successor in this project was Frank Allaben. The second son of an Oberlin, Ohio Congregationalist minister, Allaben became a fixture of New York's genealogical publishing scene as head of the genealogical department at the Grafton Press.Footnote ³¹ In 1907, he established the Frank Allaben Genealogical Company; later still, he founded the National Historical Society, an umbrella group for heritage and filiopietistic societies, and edited its organ, the Journal of American History.Footnote ³² In all of his exploits Allaben proved a committed reactionary. As head of an ad hoc “Publicity Committee” struck to support the expulsion of elected socialist members of the New York State assembly, he defended American values against the vanguard of the proletarian revolution; meanwhile, he spearheaded a quixotic rearguard insurgency against the Copernican revolution, championing the minority view that the Sun revolved around the Earth.Footnote ³³ His vision for historical research and publishing was similarly conservative, favouring patriotism and romantic antimodernism over the scientific empiricism that animated his scholarly contemporaries.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, Allaben collaborated with the eugenics movement, suggesting that, like Welles, he saw genealogy in racial terms.Footnote ³⁵ Besides his ideological commitments, Allaben exhibited considerable business acumen, evident in the complicated network of companies and nonprofit societies he incorporated to disseminate his wares.Footnote ³⁶ In method as in content, Allaben's historical project was unabashedly American.

Genealogy, Allaben's first passion, figured prominently in his version of American history, and in genealogical methodology Allaben was, at least by his own reckoning, a revolutionary. Most nineteenth-century American genealogists, in emulation of European convention, had focused on descent, the identification of all descendants of a common ancestor.Footnote ³⁷ However, in his 1904 manual, Concerning Genealogies, Allaben proposed the superiority of ascent, the identification of all ancestors of a living individual, as an approach for American family historians, and even assigned it the name the “Grafton method”:

This approach was attractive in a settler society where many people were relatively recent arrivals and most were not descended from illustrious ancestors. By situating the genealogist, rather than his or her distant forefathers, at the centre of the genealogical project, Allaben helped to democratize both family-history research and American heraldic practice. Where European conventions made direct descent in the senior male line the prerequisite for bearing an ancestor's coat of arms, focussing on the genealogist's own multiple lines of ascent opened new avenues for research and increased the likelihood of finding an armigerous ancestor, even if the connection was tenuous. Indeed, Allaben's second genealogical manual, How to Trace and Record Your Own Ancestry, published posthumously in 1932, noted that “the rule of bearing only the Arms of one's surname … does not apply in the case of the decorative use of arms – as paintings, rings, book-plates. For such, it is correct to use the Arms of any armigerous family from which you can prove descent.” Moreover, he affirmed that there was nothing “un-American” about displaying coats of arms, and surmised that the vast majority of Americans could trace their descent from at least one armigerous ancestor, provided all possible lines of ascent were considered.Footnote ³⁹ Allaben was not the first American genealogist to favour ascent; William Stowell Mills's Foundations of Genealogy, the first genealogical manual intended primarily for American readers, commended the approach some five years earlier, and pedigrees prepared in support of membership applications to lineage-based societies necessarily – and sometimes controversially – relied upon the applicant's female and collateral lines.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, Allaben's case for ascent underpinned a political and commercial project: he would make pride of ancestry, once a suspect trapping of aristocracy, accessible to the masses, making himself a tidy profit in the process. Genealogy and heraldry were mutually reinforcing elements of this project, as they had been for Welles: just as the “Grafton method” legitimized wider use of coats of arms, the use of heraldry to evoke ascent as well as descent lent prestige to the new genealogical approach.

Allaben's genealogy and heraldry of ascent targeted one constituency in particular: it elevated the status of women in genealogical narrative, encouraging researchers to consider female ancestors in their search for “sturdy stocks.” The use of coats of arms borne by ancestors on female lines reflected this new understanding of family history, and it was deeply upsetting to heraldic purists. In Europe, an emphasis on male descent relegated women to the margins of heraldic practice; in certain circumstances women might use the arms of their fathers or husbands, but rarely did they bear their own coats of arms or transmit these to their children. A New York correspondent of the English magazine Notes and Queries derided the “class of Americans … who calmly assume the arms borne by one of their female ancestors … no matter how many generations removed and calmly flaunt them in the faces of self-respecting fellow countrymen.”Footnote ⁴¹ However, as Allaben correctly noted, the study of genealogy and heraldry in the Old World was inextricable from the application of property law and therefore reflected the prevailing gendered hierarchy. The American separation of law and genealogy legitimized the pragmatic use of female arms by crest fiends, and reflected the growing involvement of women in genealogical and heraldic research. Mrs. Rasher was just one fictional example of a female social climber fascinated by genealogy as a status symbol. Another was Nelly Divver, the protagonist of Sara Agnes Pryor's 1895 short story “The Search for an Ancestor.” The daughter of a rural New England leather worker, Nelly becomes obsessed with researching her lineage as a means of gaining the acceptance of New York society that marriage alone does not afford. As Elène de Vere, the name she assumes on the basis of her research, she is warmly embraced by her erstwhile detractors. Pryor knew her subjects well, having been a prominent member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and of the Society of Colonial Dames, hereditary sororities whose role in popularizing genealogy among women has been well documented.Footnote ⁴² The Chicago Times also identified women as the principal drivers of the crest craze in an article poking fun at one of Mr. Rasher's hapless real-life cohorts. “He, like a sensible man, had intended only to have his cipher on the panels [of his carriage], but the ‘women folks’ were more ambitious, and never rested until in a moment of weakness he consented to emblazon the doors of his coach with a coat of arms.”Footnote ⁴³

Acknowledging the importance of women as consumers of heraldry, Allaben allied himself with prominent female popularizers of the field. In later life he forged a close bond with genealogist Mabel T. R. Washburn, so close, in fact, that she assumed control of his business empire after his death, much to the consternation of his widow.Footnote ⁴⁴ Earlier, however, Allaben collaborated with Frances M. Smith, alias Eleanor Lexington, a syndicated social columnist. Around the turn of the century, Smith's interests had shifted from advice for hostesses and homemakers to genealogy and heraldry. Her weekly column, “A Corner in Ancestors,” appeared as early as 1903 and continued, occasionally under a different title or a pseudonym, into the 1920s. Each column briefly traced the origins of particular surnames and the exploits of early bearers of the surname in America.Footnote ⁴⁵ Like Welles's work, Smith's histories appealed to whimsically romantic expectations of family history. One column affirmed the descent of the Freeman family from several medieval kings; another suggested that the Clark family counted the biblical undertaker Joseph of Arimathea among its progenitors.Footnote ⁴⁶ The inclusion of a line drawing of a coat of arms associated with the surname enhanced the antimodern appeal of each instalment of the feature.

Allaben enthusiastically endorsed Smith's efforts. She became associate editor of the Journal of American History, where some of her columns appeared, and in 1909 the Frank Allaben Genealogical Company published a multivolume collection under the title Colonial Families of America.Footnote ⁴⁷ In his preface to Colonial Families, Allaben was quick to point out that the quaint sketches of early American families made no claim to be exhaustive “genealogies.” However, they might inspire readers to pursue their own genealogical researches, and, of course, the Frank Allaben Genealogical Company offered a range of products and services to assist.Footnote ⁴⁸ The generality of the sketches, meant to appeal to all readers with the surname, was one of several features that distinguished Allaben and Smith's Colonial Families from Allaben's commissioned genealogies, and from the work of Welles's American College of Heraldry. Running to seven volumes and some three hundred surname histories, the project's scale dwarfed Welles's American Family Antiquity, and with scale came reduced costs. Personalized genealogies cost several hundred dollars, unaffordable to all but the wealthiest Americans. By contrast, family offprints from Colonial Families cost one dollar, within reach of the broad middle class.Footnote ⁴⁹ For those seeking more tangible forms of heraldic memorabilia, Allaben and Smith offered custom armorial bookplates and stationery and coat of arms paintings on vellum, cardboard, wood and porcelain.Footnote ⁵⁰ Smith's family histories served as advertising for these products, and reached a much larger audience than any earlier attempt to popularize heraldry and genealogy. Distributed by the McClure Syndicate, “A Corner in Ancestors” appeared in metropolitan and small-town newspapers throughout the country, reaching hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers for whom it cost no more than a few cents.Footnote ⁵¹ An indication of the column's influence on American understandings of genealogy and heraldry may be seen in the works of amateur genealogists who cited Smith's work, or even reprinted it verbatim, in their own family histories.Footnote ⁵² Although perhaps not intended as authoritative genealogies, the works of Allaben and Smith were so received by consumers.

Democratizing heraldry was more problematic than democratizing genealogy. Everyone has ancestors and a surname, but not everyone in Europe, let alone colonial America, had a coat of arms. Like Welles's college a generation earlier, Allaben's project of an American heraldic registry, announced in the Journal of American History in 1911, promised “rigid examination” of all claims to authentic coats of arms according to European standards.Footnote ⁵³ In practice, as we have seen, he encouraged the use of arms from female lines for decorative purposes, and, in cases where descent from an armigerous family could not be proven, he tacitly endorsed the assumption of arms based solely on similarity of surname. In his 1908 Ancestry of Leander Howard Crall, a fine example of a genealogy of ascent, Allaben speculated that the Pennsylvania-born newspaper magnate might be descended from the Krals of Dobravoda, a princely Slovak family, and accordingly printed the Kral arms in the book, even as he acknowledged that there was no evidence of the connection.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Colonial Families, Smith was careful to trace coats of arms either to a British grant or to use in pre-Revolutionary times, and she indicated that the arms illustrated belonged to a particular branch of the family, but no such disclaimers appeared in the abridged newspaper versions. To thousands of readers for whom “A Corner in Ancestors” was a first and perhaps only source for heraldic information, Smith's work suggested that coats of arms belonged to surnames and could justifiably be assumed by anyone bearing that surname. Generic heraldry, removed from its European social significance, was a visual signifier of Allaben and Smith's democratic genealogy.

Allaben and Smith did not invent the idea of a coat of arms as an appurtenance of a surname, but their work popularized it, and subsequent generations of genealogical retailers adopted the format they had developed – a surname coat of arms accompanied by a series of colourful family anecdotes. Some fifty years later, one of the most successful imitators of the duo's business model was an Ohio-based entrepreneur named Gary Halbert. Halbert marketed a variety of products over his forty-year career, from postage stamps to a self-published sex manual, and even after his death in 2007 he remains a folk hero within an Internet subculture devoted to get-rich-quick schemes.Footnote ⁵⁵ The sale of family crests was his first foray into the lucrative world of direct retail. In 1970, the young Halbert acquired a list of some seventy million American postal addresses. He sent personalized letters to each household, offering an illuminated scroll of a coat of arms associated with its surname.Footnote ⁵⁶ The format of a brief history of the surname accompanied by a black-and-white coat-of-arms illustration, drawn from standard heraldic reference works, was remarkably similar to “A Corner in Ancestors.” Heavy off-white paper and a decorative border of gothic arches and trumpeting cherubim gave the scrolls a patina of antiquity. The success of the scheme depended on the growth of resurgence of genealogy that began in the 1950s and 1960s. Heraldry, too, had experienced a more modest renaissance in America; the much-publicized 1961 grant of arms to President John F. Kennedy by the Chief Herald of Ireland, for example, raised the profile of the medium.Footnote ⁵⁷ Halbert gambled that American consumers’ interest in their family past would convince them to buy novelties through the mail.

For Gary Halbert, heraldry was just another commodity. As soon as his heraldic enterprise demonstrated its profitability, Halbert sold his interest in the company to pursue even more spurious projects, including a scam to sell nonexistent bicentennial collector plates which earned him eighteen months in a California prison. Subsequent court cases suggest that the real asset of Halbert's was not its product, but its proprietary list of customers, to which Halbert retained access when he sold his interest in the company. Purchase of a heraldry scroll identified a customer who was receptive to direct marketing, inviting future solicitations. Even if the scrolls were nothing more than curios, even loss leaders, they had a tremendous circulation and could not but have influenced popular perceptions of heraldry. In its first full year of operation alone, selling scrolls for one dollar and armorial plaques for twenty, the company reported gross revenues exceeding $3 million, an indication of the popularity of the product and the extent of Halbert's marketing efforts.Footnote ⁵⁸

Halbert's production methods advanced the principle of universal access to heraldry, already evident in Allaben and Smith's work, to its logical conclusion. When Halbert's “researchers” encountered a surname with no associated coat of arms on record, they simply designed a new one, a practice they deemed consistent with ancient heraldic convention.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, the “heraldic artists of centuries ago” would have been astonished at the company's twentieth-century methods. These came to light in 1977 in the course of false-advertising proceedings against Halbert's Canadian licensee, Sovereign Seat Cover Manufacturing of Cornwall, Ontario. According to a former Sovereign employee, new designs invariably were displayed on a shield divided quarterly, with a smaller shield—an “escutcheon of pretence” in heraldic terms—at its centre. A simple computer program used the first four letters of the surname to determine instantly the charges and colours for each quarter and the escutcheon.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus the arms assigned to the Apperson family featured a capital letter “A” in the first quarter, a phoenix in the second and third, a vertical stripe (a “pale” in heraldry) in the fourth, and a purple escutcheon of pretence.Footnote ⁶¹ The arms of the Malseeds followed the same formula: a capital “M” in the first quarter, a sea horse in the second and third, a checkered pattern in the fourth, and a red escutcheon of pretence.Footnote ⁶² As spelling alone determined the design, the Malseeds theoretically shared their family crest with Malsams, Malschs, and Malsons, while the Appersons shared theirs with Appells, Appelmans, and Appenzellers, regardless of whether or not these names were true cognates. In fact, the Malseeds apparently shared their blazon with a Canadian family of Welsmans, who purchased a design from Sovereign in 1976 that was identical but for the initial in the first quarter.Footnote ⁶³

Unresearched designs allowed Halbert's to avoid ever disappointing a prospective customer, an objective that Allaben had proposed and that continues to underlie commercial family crest marketing.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, Halbert's and its successors achieved universality at the expense of history, as unresearched designs divorced familiar heraldic forms from their traditional significance. In European heraldry, the quartering of a shield usually indicates that the bearer is entitled – by inheritance or political authority – to use more than one coat of arms. Common in royal and state heraldry, the quarterly division of the shield is a familiar form even to those with minimal heraldic knowledge.Footnote ⁶⁵

Structurally, a Halbert's family crest suggested the respectability of its purchaser, which the accompanying explanation of the crest's symbolism confirmed. In the vague but positive connotations of his arms, any purchaser could see himself. The arms of Tuininga family, designed for a New Hampshire customer in 1974, featured a dolphin as a symbol of “charity, affection, [and] music,” while those devised the same year for the Gura family of Texas featured a sun to represent “glory, splendor, [and] high authority.” Both arms featured a purple escutcheon of pretence, evoking “nobility [and] distinction.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In the arms purchased by a Swetland family, a dragon was said to be “a guardian of riches and knowledge,” while the green escutcheon symbolized “hope, vitality, [and] plenty.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The coat-of-arms scroll thus became a layperson's key to an alluring premodern cultural system. However, in heraldry as in other semiotic sciences, the meanings of particular devices and colours have never been immutable; they vary across time and cultural traditions. Indeed, some scholars caution against relying on prescriptive heraldic treatises to interpret the symbolism of early coats of arms, as heraldic practice regularly departed from symbolic theory.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like the familiar quarterly structure, the authoritative interpretations of symbols and colours in Halbert's scrolls belied the complexity of historical European heraldry. Instead, Halbert's heraldry reflected the genealogical determinism prevalent in late twentieth-century America.Footnote ⁶⁹ Like his Gilded Age precursors, Halbert offered heraldry as a means of antedating his customers’ self-perceptions.

With mass production, the cost of this vicarious connection with the past dropped precipitously. At fifty dollars, life membership in the American College of Heraldry and Genealogical Registry, which included emblazonment of the member's arms, was out of reach for even the moderately well-to-do. Thirty years later, Allaben sold armorial paintings on vellum for twenty dollars, while Smith offered pen-and-ink sketches of family arms for as little as three dollars, and bound offprints from Colonial Families cost only a dollar. By 1970, Halbert's sold their scrolls for the same amount. Corrected for inflation the change is even more striking: in constant 2003 dollars, Welles's life membership cost $893, Allaben's vellum painting $371, Smith's sketch $54, Smith and Allaben's booklet $19, and Halbert's coat of arms scroll a little less than $5. Consequently, while the American College of Heraldry and Genealogical Registry could claim no more – and probably far fewer – than five hundred life members, drawn exclusively from the high bourgeoisie, Halbert's customers numbered in the millions.Footnote ⁷⁰

The promise of universal accessibility also further altered the significance of American heraldry. Welles, Allaben and Smith's project was political as well as commercial. Their conceptions of an American heraldry symbolic of an American genealogy were steeped in nationalist rhetoric, to say nothing of the racial assumptions implicit in Welles's biological metaphors and in Allaben's occasional collaborations with eugenics researchers. Although some Halbert's publications included patriotic boilerplate, there was no such pretext behind the company's heraldic products. Ironically, Halbert did produce a quintessentially American heraldry, precisely because he eschewed ideological considerations in favour of pure profit. His was a heraldry for Fordist America: automated and inexpensive, universally accessible yet crudely personalized. As the proposed symbolism of the unresearched designs indicated, Halbert's brand of antimodernism satisfied personal rather than national demands. To Halbert's customers, the promise of authentic connection to the past was enticing: for example, John Larabie of Ottawa testified that he had purchased his surname scroll from Halbert's Canadian licensee in hope that it would link his family to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.Footnote ⁷¹ The family crest as a mark of premodern virtues and accomplishments epitomized the personal and therapeutic impulses which T. J. Jackson Lears finds at the core of modern culture's “self-referential search for authenticity.”Footnote ⁷²

The personalization of American heraldic enterprise paralleled the shift in focus from the social to the personal in genealogical research.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, the changes in heraldry serve as a litmus test for the diffusion of new genealogical practices, such as Allaben's emphasis on ascent. However, the parallels only ran so far, as late twentieth-century heraldry became increasingly separate from genealogy. Early crest purveyors capitalized on public demand for status symbols, but insisted that these be grounded in genealogy. In theory if not in practice, Welles endorsed rigourous research in European heraldic records as the foundation for sound American heraldry. Allaben and Smith also hoped to encourage good genealogical research, even if they legitimized innovations such as the assumption of arms from female lines. By contrast, Halbert's separated heraldry not only from traditional design standards but from genealogical practice itself. Assigning coats of arms based on similarity of surname rather than documented descent expanded Halbert's potential market, but it guaranteed that virtually no one who purchased a coat of arms could legitimately bear it by the European criteria proposed by Welles or even by the more flexible standard suggested by Allaben. Seeking authenticity, the purchaser of a family crest scroll received instead a simulacrum.

But millions of Americans have undoubtedly ascribed authentic meanings to Halbert's family crests in spite of their inauthenticity. For some, displaying a mail-order coat of arms might express membership in a kin group more broadly defined than the family, suggesting a new popular conception of genealogical connection. The emergence of “one-name studies” is one genealogical corollary to the surname coat of arms. An alternative to narratives of descent and ascent alike, one-name studies identify all bearers of a common surname, even if they are genetically unrelated; although some researchers in one-name studies fear that Halbert's has given their field a bad name, others have found the company's compendia of households with the same surname useful in broadening their research.Footnote ⁷⁴ For other consumers, the family crest might suggest a vague admiration for romantic, antimodern social values, just as it connoted nobility for the crest fiends of the Gilded Age. The promise of connection to the past, real or imagined, is the one constant in commercial American heraldry. At the conclusion of Mrs. Rasher's Curtain Lectures, Mr. Rasher's pork-packing firm files for bankruptcy, and the heroine's armorial teaspoons – now in the possession of a smug neighbour – serve as a souvenir of the family's brief entry into high society.Footnote ⁷⁵ The heraldic surname scroll serves the same purpose, a nostalgic reminder of a past whose reality subsists primarily in the imagination of the purchaser. In their efforts to Americanize heraldry and make it accessible to the largest possible market, heraldic entrepreneurs altered the stories a family crest could tell.