I am Hungarian and I would like to know what the family crest is for komuves.?

Question

Ive been trying to put together research on my family and havent ben able to find my family's crest, it is for the hungarian name Komuves.

Answer 1

While Shirley T's answer is very good, I'd like to amend it with regard to Hungarian armory in particular.

Like she said, there is NO SUCH THING as "the family crest for [insert surname here]". Even if you correct the terminology (the crest is the thing on top of the helmet on top of the shield; what you probably meant was "coat of arms"), there's *still* NO SUCH THING as "the family coat of arms for [insert surname here]". The reasons for this are many, but they all have to do with inheritance, both of the coats themselves and also of the surname(s) in question.

In most heraldic jurisdictions, the coat of arms was passed down kind of like a piece of furniture: while the parents are living, all the kids can use the furniture, but when the parents die, the furniture gets passed down to one person, who then gets the use of it for himself and his children.

In Hungary, this wasn't entirely the case, because coats of arms were often granted to entire families at once, sometimes even with a few friends thrown in for good measure. It's not quite clear to me how the arms would be inherited, but what IS clear is that the inheritance would be specific to persons, not their surnames, because in many cases, each of the grantees had a different surname. Let me repeat that: a single coat of arms was granted to people of several different surnames!

Add the fact that surnames in Hungary did not become 100% inherited until fairly late (although of course the nobility were the first to use "family names", i.e. inherited surnames), and also the fact that, like in the rest of Europe, many unrelated families could use the same surnames, and more than one such unrelated family could be granted (completely different) arms; and you should be able to see that the chances are very, very low that there is any coat of arms that you, personally, have any right to bear.

Getting down to specifics, I could not find a coat of arms granted to anyone with the surname "Kőműves". The closest I found was a grant to Aknai Kőmíves Gergely, his wife Solymosi alias György Katalin, and their son János, on January 11th, 1700. At that date, it's entirely possible that the names are being used literally, i.e. Gergely could have been a mason who came from the town called Akna, and his wife, the daughter of a man named György, could have come from the town called Solymos. Their son could've been as likely to use Gergely as a surname as Kömives, unless he, too, became a mason.

Now, it's probable that a lowly mason would not have been raised into the nobility, so the more likely scenario is that Janos and his descendants used "Aknai Kömíves" as their surname, and the only masons they would admit to being associated with were ones of the "Free-" variety. (1700 is a bit early, but eventually it became standard practice among the Hungarian nobility to use names of the form [locative] [family name], paralleling the German use of "von". Pretenders to the nobility would ape this practice, adding the locative -i or -y suffix to pretty much any name.) However, unless you can show that you are descended from said Aknai Kőmíves János, and not some other family which had masons in its geneology, you have absolutely no rights to the coat of arms granted to János and his parents 308 years ago.

For completeness, here's a link to the Aknai Kőmíves arms from 1700, but I emphasize again, *these are NOT YOUR FAMILY ARMS*, because there is NO SUCH THING.

http://www.arcanum.hu/mol/lpext.dll/mol_...

(blue field, green trimount, white bird and rabbit; I can't tell what kind of bird, other than some sort of raptor.)

Answer 2

A crest is part of a coat of arms. Coats of arms do not belong to surnames.  There are lots of peddlers on the internet, at airports, at shopping malls, in magazines and solicit by mail selling coats of arms by surnames. That is not valid.

Frequently, they are valid coats of arms for some person but not for everyone with that surname.   The surname product business which includes coats of arms is one of the biggest scams around.

They were granted to individuals and are passed down to the legitimate male line descendants.  There might have been, for instance, 15 different men with the same surname, not all necessarily related, that were each granted their own coat of arms, all different.  No one peddler that sells them will have all 15, no way. They don't need to in order to sell to gullible people. The only time they will have more than one is if more than one person with the same surname from more than one national origin were granted one.  In that case, they will have one of each when in fact there might be several of each.  Then there will be some persons with that surname that none of their ancestors were ever granted a coat of arms.

If this is a school project, please print off the 2 links I am furnishing you and give them to your teacher, one from the British College of Arms(they grant coats of arms) and the other from the most prestigious genealogical organization in the U.S., The National Genealogical Society.

http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/Faq.ht...

http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/comconsumerp...