The Dream and The System

My dream for this project is that we can both have crests that really represent us as families and as individuals, and I’d like to create a set of guidelines that allows all of the crests, family colors, etc., follow a common theme in how they are presented and catalogued. At the moment, I have only decided on the cresting system, but I think we may be able to expand to family colors or flags. I’m open to suggestions so please contact me (most easily on Facebook) if you have any ideas.
I am a graphic designer (it’s the family business), so I can do some if not all of a crest if you don’t have any artistic talents. But more importantly, I want to discuss what the Spinney crest should encompass and the three levels of crests I’ve come up with (pictures will follow).

The crest from the web is listed at the top of the page.... Unfortunately, the severely greedy on the internet place one of several spellings in the name banner below the crest and try to make you pay for it. DO NOT pay for this. It’s just a principle thing. And besides, this whole project is based on the idea that we may not be descendants of this crest anyway. However, if you can verify your genealogy back to this crest, I’d definitely promote using it.

But back to the level of crests:

The Spinney – The primary Spinney crest. The crest of the Spinney name and of all Spinneys regardless of the origin of your Spinneyness.

NOTE: I am fully encouraging the creative use and overuse of Spinney as a word to describe just about anything (i.e., A “spinneyism” would be different than a “Spinneyism”, but both would refer to something that is an attribute of many Spinneys. Maybe an uppercase Spinneyism is if a Spinney is actually committing the Spinneyism and the lower case could refer to a non-Spinney who commits a Spinneyism, haha.)

Spinney Families – This would of course be a crest that represents your immediate family (mom, dad, children). It should develop out of the parent’s crest reusing colors or a particular element that links a particular family crest to that of the parents.

Spinneys – These are individual crests. This is most appropriate to heraldry because a coat-of-arms was originally only used by an individual knight.

What I really hope to see is something that connects Family Crests generation by generation. If you are creating your grandparent’s crest and you use red and white, you might use red or white somewhere in your family’s crest to signify that connection. I would think this logic would also carry on to the individual crests. If your family colors or crest uses only the color green, it would seem logical to have green somewhere in each of the siblings’ crests.

The reason for this is simple. Crests are about symbolism and what we want to create is something that is noble enough to literally be a crest that you may use someday or even pass down to your children. We are establishing a link that hopefully can literally be carried on into the future. With that in mind, I’m sure a set of rules of what is and isn’t acceptable will develop as submissions come in and ideas are discussed.

Once I finish an idea I have for the Primary Spinney crest, I will post it and ask for feedback. I will also post my family crest, that of my grandfather (to show the family connection) and my individual crest. I will describe and explain my use of symbolism so everyone can get an idea of where this whole thing is going.

IN OTHER NEWS:

If there is anyone out there who wants to start a forum that we can link to the block that would be awesome. Then concept art can be posted and discussions can take place more easily instead of me just showing everyone what pops up in my inbox.
The same request goes out to any Spinney web designers or hosters. I’m about to go back to school and I just don’t have the time to go about running a web site on top of designing and running this blog.

FINALLY…

If we can get a web site up I’d like to also work on our families’ genealogies. We’re young and it’s a good idea to get as much of this information before all of our older relatives pass away. You’ll be surprised when your great aunt comes up with a bunch of birth certificates hidden in the attic, I promise. Plus, we’re going to find connections. We’re going to find relatives, and we’re going to put together a puzzle that hasn’t yet been cracked.

How This Came About

The Spinney Family Project grew from the original idea that I wanted to design and have made a custom family ring. And unfortunately, like so many families, we are not fortunate enough to have a royal crest. I have found that several web sites attribute the Spinney name migrating with William the Conqueror into Britain in 1066. The sources (you can just search “Spinney genealogy” on Yahoo!) say that the name was recognized three times: once as De Spiny or DeSpiny, once as Spiny, and once as Spinney. For the five hundred years that follow this time, however, we suffer from a confusion caused by misspellings. It was inevitable as most people hardly ever had their names written down and with the exception of nobles and higher classes, hereditary lines were not tracked as we track them today. The particular crest associated with Spinney is said by some sources to also be the crest or Spine, Spinner, Spineynne, Spiny, Spines; it is a blue shield with a white chevron and three crescent moons.

There are a couple of problems with this crest being the definitive crest of the Spinney surname all of us share. First, the man who was recognized by William the Conqueror (three times none the less, very impressive) may or may not be one of our distant relatives. Tracking a single man as the source of the Spinney surname is in all likelihood impossible. The only people with that type of record come from royalty. That being said, surnames were not only given, but taken as well. A man named John moves to a new place in Britain, but because there are four Johns already, John becomes known as John Bristol because he moved from the town of Bristol. Some surnames were adopted by people who wanted to give themselves a bit of status and with all these misspellings, we can’t be sure who is a real Spinney—or Spinner, Spiney, Spine, Spinali, Spines…

We then also run into the problem that arises with what a Spinney comes to mean in Britain. A “spinney” is a wood or thicket, according to the Oxford Dictionary. No, that does not mean Spinney means “bush,” something I have heard people say several times. In proper English, a wood is a forest and a thicket being a dense sort of small bushes and trees. Places in Britain are named Spinney as if one were naming a grange, range, hill, etc. In Britain, the name Spinney has been used to name geographical areas (i.e. Spinney Hills). A book written in 1950 by Michael Joseph is titled, Groaning Spinney, and the cover is a path that leads into a murky forest. So, it appears that Spinney can both be the name awarded a place (i.e., Spinney Abbey) and the literal object named (i.e., Groaning Spinney). This then creates the possibility that there are those of us whose descendants adopted the Spinney name by their location and not by the De Spiny/Spiny/Spinney of Normandy.

The final problem is that “spinney” is considered to be of British origin. It is likely that the name (as a literal name or just as a word) came with William the Conqueror and over time came to describe a wood (forest). The problem being that without some serious DNA testing, we can’t be sure whether we are all in fact English, Norman, or any of the other groups that came over with William the Conqueror including Bretons, Flemings, and Frenchmen or a combination of many of these (unless there is some record of who all the people were that fought during William the Conqueror’s conquest).

This history of course is up for clarification and interpretation. I really hope a few Spinneys over in England can shed some light as to their origins and hopefully add to the historical explanations as this project grows.

So, where does this leave us? First, there are some pretty accurate records from a man named Thomas Spinney who was in Canada in the 1600s. That family line appears to encompass many of the Spinney families from Boston up through Canada. This is the primary concentration of Spinneys in the United States and Canada, and I hope some of you can trace your family lines through these Spinneys.

But two problems arise (as they always do). We have large emigrations that occurred from Ireland and Britain, and new lines of Spinneys (albeit possibly still connected to the Thomas Spinney of the 1600s) may have come to the New England states as well as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (there are also records of a Spinney in California). The second problem (a personal one) is that my grandfather always said that we weren’t related to any Spinneys in the area. Someone would always say, “Oh, are you related to…?” but I would cut them off explaining how my grandfather had told me were not related to most Spinneys. Until my grandfather and grandmother died, he had said on a few different occasions that there were only seven of us left. I would assume this “not related” comment would mean that the connection to other New England Spinneys (if any) goes back to England, thus removing my strand of the Spinney family from the Thomas Spinney descendants.

Did I say “two” problems? Because I meant three. I just thought of it as I thought of my grandfather’s name, George Freeman Spinney. George. George, John, Thomas, James, Anne, Ann, Mary…I can go on. Just look through a few Spinney family trees. The names repeat and repeat and repeat through the years and the only identifiable factors are birth and death dates and those certificates if they are available. At times, we then have to speculate as to brothers and sisters, especially when a certificate is missing; another factor that could divide us Spinneys even further from knowing if we are all related.

So, how does this relate to the family crest?

In so few words: We don’t have a definitive family crest. For all the reasons above, there are few if any who can legitimately connect themselves to the man who fought with William the Conqueror. So I thought it would be better to not so much unite us by family lines; instead, we will unite as Spinneys. Too many times I see all these genealogical connections with all these non-Spinneys families that married in and then branched off further, marrying away (and burying) the Spinney name. This project is a uniting of the Spinney name. While I would love to still be able to trace our origins back as far as possible, my first concern is creating a cresting system that all Spinneys can use and contribute to regardless of where the family is located or how it connects to the beginning of the Spinney name.

UP NEXT: The Process of Developing an Interesting System