Coat of Arms

[Dughlas mor]

Boats, you have managed to confuse me. [not a difficult thing to do] If your Thomas blood is Scottish, then you may belong to the MacThomas clan, or you may belong to one of the clans that claim Thomas as a sept, or you may belong to no clan at all. The only way to know is to trace your Thomas ancestors back to where they came from in Scotland. There is no Scottish tartan for Thomas. But now you seem to be saying that your Thomas blood is Welsh. If that is the case, the Thomas of Wales tartan would surely be the one to go with. I just had a look at that tartan and it is a nice one.

[boats]

Boats, you have managed to confuse me. [not a difficult thing to do] If your Thomas blood is Scottish, then you may belong to the MacThomas clan, or you may belong to one of the clans that claim Thomas as a sept, or you may belong to no clan at all. The only way to know is to trace your Thomas ancestors back to where they came from in Scotland. There is no Scottish tartan for Thomas. But now you seem to be saying that your Thomas blood is Welsh. If that is the case, the Thomas of Wales tartan would surely be the one to go with. I just had a look at that tartan and it is a nice one.

?

Yes, the Thomas tartan is a nice one. I found out from my brother that my ancestor came from Llanwenarth, Monmouthshire, Wales. Could that area be where Thomas of Wales or the clan came from?

[Dughlas mor]

I don`t think that there was ever a clan system in Wales comparable to the one in the Scottish Highlands, so there isn`t really a Welsh Thomas "clan." I know that Thomas is a very common surname in Wales. Until fairly recently, there was no such thing as a Welsh tartan, or a welsh kilt. (cilt) The Welsh name tartans were developed, I believe, in the 1970`s, and have slowly gained popularity. The Welsh Thomas tartan would certainly be appropriate for anyone named Thomas who is of Welsh descent.

[Joseph McMillan]

Tartans aside: the Welsh certainly had a tribal/clan organization similar to the Highland Scots, but the history of how surnames were adopted is a bit different, and as a result most Welsh surnames are derived from Christian given names, which tells you little about a particular modern family's specific origin. In other words, if your name is Jones, and you're of Welsh descent (a pretty good bet if your name is Jones!), all you can tell is that your ancestor at the time surnames replaced patronymics was named John. Likewise if your name is Richards/Pritchard (ap Richard), or Reese/Rice/Price (ap Rhys), and so on. Clearly there would have been thousands of Welshmen named John, Richard, Thomas, and so on, most of them unrelated to and unaffiliated with each other, which is why the concept of a Clan Jones, Clan Rice, Clan Thomas, etc, doesn't really work in the Welsh context.

As a consequence, the Welsh heraldic system is very strange, seen from a Scottish or English perspective. Various major chieftains and princes who were living in the Middle Ages--a century or so before there was heraldry anywhere, and longer than that before it made its way to Wales--were subsequently and anachronistically "assigned" coats of arms, and people who are their descendants in the male line are entitled to bear those arms. And because the surnames weren't fixed until additional centuries after the arms were "assigned," these descendants might bear dozens of different surnames, even if they share a common male-line ancestor. Lay on top of that the granting and confirmation of other arms by the English heralds starting in the 16th century.

Bottom line: because of the way Lyon Office has operated for the last several centuries, fictively assuming that people with the same last name are related, even if we don't know how, you can often tell by the appearance of a Scottish coat of arms what the bearer's name is. That doesn't apply in England, and even less so in Wales.