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
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