Many (most?) pedigrees on the internet purporting to trace normal people back to blue-blooded ancestors are wrong. This is mainly because their fabricators simply have no idea of the(first published as ) of the 19th and 20th centuries, often based (generally accurately, though not without errors) on gentry family pedigrees in older county histories. Many of these, for England and Wales, are derived ultimately from the pedigrees drawn by the heralds from the College of Arms during their visitations of the shires in the 16th and 17th centuries. Their aim was to determine who was using arms with proper authority, but the result was a rich genealogical corpus that is unsurpassed in most other countries.
