Need some help with cadency

[EagleJCS]

John,
I also wanted to say that I am sorry to hear about the loss of your brother; if your niece is still in school, it seems much too early to have lost him, particularly for your niece. My sincere condolences.

Thanks Cygnus. Yes, he was taken from us much too early. He was 39. There's a thread in the Miscellaneous forum with more details - I don't want to derail things here too much. My niece has only a younger sister, so she would indeed be my brother's heraldic heiress. It falls to me to continue the family line ... tough to do for now as I'm still a bachelor.

Regarding the starting point Mike Oettle was questioning: I was informed a few years back by a member of the SSA that since our family name is Scott, if I were to petition Lyon for a grant of Scottish arms in honor of our ancestor (see below regarding the timeline), in order for those arms to be visually recognized as Scott arms, Lyon would probably start with the chiefly Scott arms I've indicated above, then add charges, change lines and so forth to differentiate them, but keep them similar. The trick would be to avoid making them similar to existing Scott arms as well.

A few years ago, I found a list of Scott armigers from Nisbet’s A System of Heraldry (1722). Most of them have the basic Scott arms as above, with different charges either on the bend or in the field. About 90% of them start with Or, then follow with an Azure element (mostly a bend, though a couple have a fess Azure). The Scotts of Harden don't have a bend or fess but is rather "Or, two mullets in chief and a crescent in base Azure". There are also a couple of Scotts that were Argent to start with (apparently all related to the Scotts of Balwearie) with "lions heads erased Gules".

As I've mentioned in other threads, we have a brick wall in our Scott lineage at about 1780 or so (just before the Treaty of Paris of 1 Sep 1783, which officially ended the Revolutionary War). Since we can get that far back, I have somewhat tenuous proof that my ancestors were subjects of the Crown and are therefore eligible for a grant of arms (posthumously), from which my immediate family may then matriculate our own. My distant cousin, who has also been researching this line, has been unable to find the records indicating when/where our family came to the New World, and thus which branch of the Scotts we may be related to. (We may not be "Scottish" Scotts at all - there are English and Irish as well.)


Thanks to everyone for the help so far!