Re: Ingalls Family Crest
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In reply to:
Re: Ingalls Family Crest
Brian Ingalls 12/24/08
Dear Brian,
IF you are descended from Edmund Ingalls, as I am, we don't have an official, sanctioned coat of arms, because our ancestors weren't gentlemen and women. They were yeomen, and the men were entitled to vote in England, which was something, since most men couldn't vote until the 19th century. But we were not entitled to a coat of arms.
Having said that, Burleigh reproduced a coat of arms at the beginning of the Ingalls genealogy he published about a century ago. It's rather simple and elegant looking, I think with the colors silver and blue. If I remember correctly (someone correct me if I'm wrong - Bruce or Jay?), it was the coat of arms of a Norman Baron Ingalls who came to England with William the Conqueror and is mentioned in the Domesday Book. The Normans were only a couple of generations from being Vikings, after all - Vikings who had settled on the coast of Norman(Norse-men)dy.
Our Ingalls, however, had settled in England, in Lincolnshire, a century or more before that, because it was easier to collect protection money from the English every year if you lived nearby than it was to cross the sea and raid them (to go viking - the word "viking" is still in modern Swedish a verb that describes pillaging and plundering). Evidently we are descended from practical people.... Whether our distant forbears were actually related to the Norman Baron Ingalls or not, who knows? It's a nice looking coat of arms.
Hoping that clarified things somewhat,
Karen