How Your Report Is Made & Disclaimer

This page explains how a report from FamilyCrests is produced: which parts of it come from real public records, which parts our system builds, and what the report does not claim.

It is written to be read before you buy. You do not have to buy anything to read it, and it says the same thing before and after a sale.

1. What a Heritage Volume actually is

A Heritage Volume is a book about a surname.

It gathers what is generally recorded about a name: how common it is in the United States, where it appears in the printed record, which documented people have carried it, and what places and periods are connected with it. It presents that alongside a reconstructed portrait of the name's origins, movement and heraldic identity.

It is a volume about a name and the world that name moved through. It is not a case file about you.

It is sold as a one-time purchase, in three levels — The Record, The Chronicle and The Archive. They differ in length, not in method: everything on this page applies to all three. The price and the length of each one are shown on the product page before you buy.

We would rather you understand what the volume is before you pay for it than discover it afterwards.

2. How it is produced: one system, the same answer every time

Your report is generated by software we built.

The system is deterministic. In plain words: give it the same surname and it gives back the same volume every time. The same origin percentages, the same crest, the same chapters. Two strangers on opposite sides of the country who share a surname receive the same volume.

That is by design, and it has consequences worth stating plainly.

• Nothing in your report is about your particular family. The system knows your surname. It does not know your grandmother, your county or your line.
• No human reviews your order. Nobody opens an archive on your behalf. Nobody checks whether the story fits your family.
• Delivery takes minutes, because there is no queue and nobody working through a list. The volume is assembled and sent.

We name archives in the report because that is where the underlying reference material comes from. Naming an archive is not a claim that we searched it on your behalf.

3. What comes from real public records

Some of the material in your report is drawn from genuine public sources. Not every volume draws on all of them: which ones appear depends on the name, and on the volume you bought. Where one of them is used, the report shows the source, and a link where the source offers one.

3.1 In every Heritage Volume

The U.S. Census Bureau surname file. A public dataset of surnames recorded in the United States, including how many people carry a name and where it ranks nationally. When your surname is in that file, the count and the rank you see are the recorded figures.

Digitised newspaper pages from Chronicling America (Library of Congress). Public-domain newspaper pages that carry the surname in print. When one is found, the report reproduces the page image — a facsimile, meaning a photographic copy of the original page — with its title, its date, and a link to the page at the Library of Congress. That is a real page of a real newspaper.

Documented people from open reference databases. Individuals recorded with that surname: name, dates, occupation, country, and, where a freely licensed portrait exists, the image. These come from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, each with a link to its entry.

Surname etymology from open reference data. The linguistic origin and meaning of the name as recorded in open reference sources.

Surname dictionaries in the public domain. Where the name is in them, what Charles W. Bardsley’s Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames (1901) and Henry Harrison’s Surnames of the United Kingdom (1918) record about how it was formed, and, from Bardsley, an early written record he cites. And the meaning of the name as Wiktionary records it, quoted as an excerpt, with its licence.

Historical surname studies in the public domain. Where the name appears in them: H. B. Guppy’s Homes of Family Names in Great Britain (1890), which counted it per 10,000 farmers in each county of England and Wales, and per 10,000 names in Scotland; R. E. Matheson’s Special Report on Surnames in Ireland (1894), which counted the births registered under it in 1890, province by province; and the first census of the United States, taken in 1790 and tabulated by the Census Bureau in 1909, which counted families, not people. Each is quoted for what it counted, and for nothing more.

3.2 National surname registers

Some names belong to a country that publishes its own register of surnames. When yours is one of them, and only then, the report page also shows what that register records. These are civil registers published by national statistics offices:

• Poland — the PESEL national register. People carried on the register.
• Spain — the national census of surnames (INE). People recorded as living.
• France — INSEE. Births registered between 1891 and 2000 — not people alive today.
• Ireland — the CSO register of births. Surnames given to children born in Ireland. This one appears as a ranking, not as a count.

Each register counts a different thing, and the report page names which one it is quoting. A birth count over 110 years is not a population, and we do not present it as one.

And none of them means “living in that country today.” A national register includes citizens abroad: the Polish register holds more entries than Poland has residents. We name the register, never the territory.

These four we name but do not link. The registers are published as bulk data files, not as a page per surname, so there is no address to send you to for your own name. If you want the file we used, ask us and we will send you the link and the date of the edition.

Other official counts. For some names the report also shows what other official bodies count: Switzerland’s population statistics (BFS); Belgium’s population register (Statbel) and Argentina’s national register (RENAPER), which publish a name only above a minimum in each place, so their figures are a floor; Sweden (SCB), Norway (SSB), Finland (DVV, which counts citizens) and Slovenia (SURS); and the National Records of Scotland, which count how often a name is registered in one year, not how many people carry it. Where the data allows, the name is also shown region by region within a country: France by place of birth, for people who died there since 1970, and Poland, Switzerland, Belgium and Argentina by where people live. The same rules apply: each register counts something different, the report names the one it quotes, figures from different registers are never added together, and none of them is linked.

3.3 What this material is, and is not

None of this material belongs to us. It is public domain or openly licensed by other people, we reproduce it with its credit, and you can check it independently. We would like you to.

3.4 Sources and licences

Poland. PESEL national surname register. Licensed under CC0 1.0 (creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). No attribution required.

Ireland. Contains Irish public sector data from the Central Statistics Office, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Adapted: reformatted and indexed by surname.

France. INSEE, Fichier des noms. Licence Ouverte / Open Licence (Etalab). Producer: INSEE. Data last updated: 22 May 2018.

Spain. Elaboración propia con datos extraídos del sitio web del INE: www.ine.es. Edition 2026, data as at 1 January 2025.

Other registers, studies and public records. The other official counts, historical studies and public records described in this section are credited in each volume’s appendix, with the licence under which each one is published and, where the licence requires it, its exact attribution statement. They are in the public domain, or published under CC0, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wiktionary), the Open Government Licences of Canada, of its provinces and cities and of the United Kingdom, the Licence Ouverte of France, or the open-data terms of New York State and New York City.

None of these bodies endorses, sponsors or is associated with this volume or with FamilyCrests Studio LLC.

3.5 People in the public record

Some volumes also name ordinary people recorded with the surname in open public records: military enlistment and casualty records, passenger and immigration lists, civil registers of births, marriages and deaths, cemetery and probate indexes, and census returns, published by national, state, provincial and municipal archives in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Finland. Each entry says what the record says, and which archive holds it.

They are not presented as your ancestors. They are real people who bore the same name, and nothing about them is invented: their names, dates, places and occupations are as the record gives them.

How much of this a volume carries depends on its level. The Record gives the counts and the two earliest documented arrivals; The Chronicle names three of the people, and six arrivals; The Archive names every person in its selection, up to twenty-five per country, and twelve arrivals.

Privacy comes first. A person is named only when their death was recorded at least twenty-five years ago (thirty for records from Ontario, Canada), or their birth is at least a hundred years old, or the record itself is at least a hundred and ten years old. Nobody who died under the age of eighteen is named, and records of some kinds, among them divorces, prisons and court proceedings, are never shown. If you find someone in a volume who you believe should not be there, write to customer@myheritagestories.com and we will remove them.

4. What our system builds

The rest of the volume is generated by our system from the surname itself, following consistent internal rules. It is a reconstruction: a coherent, repeatable portrait built around the name. It is not retrieved from any record about your family.

That includes:

• the year the name is given as first appearing;
• the percentage breakdown of regional origins;
• the haplogroup and "genetic echo" material (see section 10);
• the coat of arms image, which is generated by artificial intelligence (see section 9);
• the migration routes, settlement patterns and projections;
• the narrative prose of the chapters, which is written by an AI language model working over the material above. That writing step runs on an outside AI provider's systems. What we handle and who handles it is described in our Privacy Policy.

Read those parts for what they are: an interpretation, held to the same shape every time the name is entered.

5. Record or reconstruction, side by side

Our two volumes are built from different material, so they get one table each.

5.1 Heritage Volume

5.2 Crossing Volume

A Crossing Volume is not about a surname: it is about a route — where the family left from, where they landed, and in which decade. What is recorded and what is reconstructed falls differently.

Not every row appears in every volume: which ones do depends on the route, the decade and the level you bought.

6. When a surname is not in the public sources

This is the section to read twice.

Not every surname appears in the public record. The U.S. Census Bureau file lists only names that occur often enough to meet its reporting threshold, so rarer surnames are simply absent from it. A great many newspaper pages have been digitised, but plenty of surnames appear on none of them.

When that happens, our system fills the section in rather than leaving it empty. Where a census figure would be, our system produces a figure. Where a press section would be, our system produces a press section. Every customer receives a complete volume.

We are telling you this in plain language, because you cannot always work it out from the page:

Any figure or section produced this way is a reconstruction by our system. It is internally consistent, and it is repeatable for that surname, but it is not a number read off a record. It appears in the same place, and in the same style, as a figure that was.

This is a decision about how the product works. We chose completeness: we would rather hand you a finished volume than a book with holes in it. It is not an accident, and we would rather describe it precisely than let you find out on your own.

How to tell which is which. Where the volume shows you a source and a link, the material comes from that source, and you can open it and check. Where it shows no source, treat the content as our system's reconstruction. We do not promise that every reconstructed passage carries a label saying so.

So if a particular figure in your volume matters to you, write to customer@myheritagestories.com, quote it, and we will tell you whether it came from a record or from our system. That offer is real, it applies to free reports as well as paid ones, and it has no time limit.

And if this section changes your mind about the product after you have already paid, that is what the refund window is for. See section 13.

7. Free reports: Coat of Arms and Origins

Not everything on this site is sold. Two of our reports are free: Coat of Arms and Origins. You enter a surname and an email address, and the system gives you a report without any purchase at all.

Everything on this page applies to them, without exception:

• the same system builds them, and no one researches your family;
• the same surname always produces the same free report;
• the same split between real public record and reconstruction applies, including the filling described in section 6;
• the crest you see is the same artificial-intelligence artwork described in section 9;
• they are not proof of ancestry, not a grant of arms and not a DNA test, exactly as set out in section 11.

Two things are different, and both follow from the price.

There is nothing to refund, because nothing was paid. If a free report is not what you hoped for, you have lost nothing but the minutes it took, and you are welcome to write and tell us so.

You gave us an email address, and we use it. We use it to deliver what you asked for, and we may also send you marketing emails about our products. Every one of those emails carries an unsubscribe link, and you can also ask us to stop by writing to customer@myheritagestories.com. What we do with your information, and how to make us stop, is set out in our Privacy Policy and on our Your Privacy Choices page.

8. The Crossing Volume

The Crossing Volume is a separate report about a migration route and the crossing itself. It is sold in the same three levels.

It runs on a different system from the Heritage Volume, built on the same principles: real public reference material where it exists, deterministic reconstruction elsewhere, and the same request always producing the same result. Sections 2, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 15 of this page apply to it unchanged. What differs is where its material comes from, and how it handles a gap — set out below.

The reports are independent of one another. Content from one is never carried into another.

8.1 Where its material comes from

A Crossing Volume is built from a route, not from a surname, so it draws on a different set of public sources:

• Willcox & Ferenczi, International Migrations, Vol. I: Statistics (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1929). The standard statistical compilation of emigration in the era of mass migration. The volume cites the country and the table it took each figure from.
• Office of Homeland Security Statistics (DHS). Arrivals recorded in the United States by country of origin and decade.
• The National Archives (United Kingdom). Context for British emigration, and the outbound passenger lists a descendant can search.
• Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Canadian entry legislation and arrivals.
• Official gazettes and national statistics offices of the destination countries — among them the Câmara dos Deputados and IBGE for Brazil, the Boletín Oficial and the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones for Argentina, Stats NZ and the New Zealand Legal Information Institute, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
• Wikidata, for vessels and shipping lines.
• Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons, for public-domain photographs of the period, each printed with its credit.

Where a figure comes from one of these, the volume names the source — and, in the case of the 1929 compilation, the table it is on, so you can open the volume and find the row.

8.2 When the record exists but does not answer the question

This is the part worth reading slowly, because it is where we refuse to give you a number.

Migration statistics of that era were filed by the flag a person travelled under, not by the country they came from. An emigrant leaving Warsaw in 1900 was recorded under Russia, together with Russians, Finns and Lithuanians, because Poland was not a separate entry in the record.

So when the source counted a whole empire and your origin was one country inside it, we have three options: give you the empire’s figure, invent one, or withhold it. We withhold it. The volume shows no number for that decade — it never lends you the empire’s figure as though it were your country’s.

Where the series allows it, the volume goes further and names the headings your country was counted under, so you can see where those people ended up in the record. Where it does not, the decade is simply left without a figure. The first of those is true of every volume; the second depends on what the source recorded for that route.

Handing you 1.5 million and calling it Polish emigration would be wrong, and it would read exactly like a fact. We would rather the section be honest than full.

Everywhere else, where no source covers the question at all, the section is written by our system and is a reconstruction of the period — the same as section 4 describes for the Heritage Volume.

9. About the coat of arms

The crest in your volume is an original image, generated by artificial intelligence inside our system and associated with your surname. The same surname always yields the same crest, and the image draws on a heraldic visual vocabulary.

It is an artistic interpretation. To be explicit:

• It is not a grant of arms and confers no right to arms.
• It is not registered with, issued by, or recognised by any heraldic authority, college of arms, chief herald or government body in any country.
• It does not establish that you or your ancestors were ever entitled to bear arms.
• In several countries, arms belong to individuals, not to surnames. Nothing here overrides that.

It is a piece of artwork made for a name. That is the claim, and it is the whole claim. The same artwork is what appears on our printed and manufactured products.

10. About the genetic content: there is no DNA test

Some parts of the volume discuss haplogroups — broad, ancient ancestry groupings used in population studies — and what we call the genetic echo of a name's regions.

No DNA is involved at any point. We never collect, request, receive, sequence, store or analyse genetic material or genetic data. There is no kit, no swab, no sample, no lab.

That content is population-level: it describes patterns associated with regions and periods, not with you. It says nothing about your ancestry, your health, your carrier status or your risk of anything.

It must not be used to inform any medical decision. If you have questions about your health or your genetics, speak with a physician or a licensed genetic counsellor.

11. What this report is not

Stated once, clearly, so there is no room for misunderstanding.

1. It is not a genealogical investigation. No one traced your family, your line or your ancestors.
2. It is not proof of descent. It does not establish a link between you and any person, family, place or event named in it. That includes the documented individuals shown in the volume, who are people recorded with the same surname and nothing more.
3. It is not support for citizenship, heritage, membership, inheritance or nobility claims, and it should not be submitted as such — to a court, a registry, a consulate, a bank or anyone else.
4. It is not a grant of arms. See section 9.
5. It is not a DNA test or a genetic report about you. See section 10.
6. It is not legal, medical, financial or professional advice of any kind.
7. It is not guaranteed to be accurate about your family, because it was never about your family. Public-record material is reproduced as published, and published records themselves contain errors, variant spellings and gaps.

If what you want is a documented trace of your own ancestors, what you need is a professional genealogist or a records service. That is a different product, and we would rather say so than sell you this one under a false description.

12. What we do stand behind

We are not apologising for this product. Here is what we will defend:

• The public-record material is real and credited. When the volume shows you a digitised newspaper page carrying your name, that page exists, and the link takes you to it at the Library of Congress.
• The reconstruction is consistent and rule-governed, not improvised for each customer. It behaves the same way every time.
• If you ask us where a specific line in your volume came from, we will answer that question.
• The volume is complete and finished: a bound piece of work about a name, delivered in minutes.

That is what you are buying, and we would rather you buy it knowing exactly what it is.

13. Delivery, access and refunds

This page is about how a report is made. Delivery, access and money each have their own page, and those pages carry the detail. If this summary and one of them ever disagree, the page that covers the subject is the one that counts.

Delivery. A digital report arrives within minutes: a page you can read straight away, and a PDF sent to the email address you used at checkout. If it does not arrive, check your spam folder first, then write to us. The full detail is on Shipping & Delivery.

Access. Your report is reachable through a private link that is unique to you. Keep the email, and do not post the link publicly, because anyone who has it can open the report. Some customers also reach their reports through our member portal. Download the PDF and keep your own copy: that file is yours and it does not depend on our website. What we promise about how long online access lasts is in our Terms of Service, and if you ask us to delete your personal information, the hosted access goes with it — see our Privacy Policy.

Refunds. If a digital report is not what you expected, write to customer@myheritagestories.com within 30 days of buying and we will refund it. You do not need a reason. If the page you bought from displayed a longer guarantee than that, the longer promise is the one that applies to your order. The rules, including the ones for physical items, are on Refunds & Cancellations.

No account needed. You buy as a guest. We do not ask you to create an account.

14. The printed and manufactured products

We also sell physical products built around the same artwork — for example the signet ring, the framed crest and the family pack.

Two things to be clear about:

• The artwork on them is the same artistic interpretation described in section 9. Buying a physical item does not make the crest official, registered or granted, and it does not change what the report is.
• They are made to order by outside manufacturers, who receive your name and your shipping address in order to make and send your order. Because more than one manufacturer is involved, an order with several pieces can arrive in separate packages, on separate days, with separate tracking.

Production time, transit time, tracking and customs are set out on Shipping & Delivery. In short: the price includes shipping and delivery to your door, and you are not asked for anything on arrival — if a carrier ever does ask you for an import charge, send it to us and we will cover it. And if a piece is going to take longer than we published, we email you and you can cancel it for a full refund.

Cancelling a physical order, and what happens if a piece arrives damaged, defective or wrong, are set out on Refunds & Cancellations. The 30-day refund described in section 13 is the rule for digital reports; physical items have their own.

15. Questions about this page, or about your own volume

If anything here is unclear, or if you want to know how a specific figure in your own report was produced, write to customer@myheritagestories.com and ask. Quote the line. We will tell you whether it came from a record or from our system.

Email is our only support channel: there is no phone line and no live chat. We answer within 48 hours. Other ways to reach us are listed on our Contact page.

If you use assistive technology and something on this site gets in your way, our Accessibility page explains how to tell us and what we do about it.

This page forms part of our terms of sale. It is the page that governs how our reports are produced and what they do and do not claim. See our Terms of Service for the rest of the agreement, our Privacy Policy for what we do with your information, and our Cookie Policy for cookies, pixels and advertising.

About this page

This page describes how our volumes are produced as of the date below. Our sources and our method grow over time: when we add a public source, or change how a section is built, we update this page and change that date. The version in force on the day of your purchase is recorded with your order for purchases made from 14 September 2026 onward, and we will give it to you on request, at any time, with no deadline. For earlier purchases, write to us and we will tell you what this page said at the time, from the dated copies we hold.

Last updated: September 15, 2026