Portuguese Family Crests: Maritime Heritage & Heraldry

The arms of Portugal are Argent, five escutcheons Azure in cross, each charged with five bezants Argent, within a bordure Gules charged with seven castles Or — the quinas, the five little shields, within a border of castles.

The legend is famous: that the five shields commemorate five Moorish kings defeated by Afonso Henriques at the battle of Ourique in 1139, and the bezants the five wounds of Christ.

The likelier account is duller and more interesting. The earliest Portuguese royal shield carried a plain cross of silver plates or nails on blue; over successive redrawings those metal plates were reinterpreted as small shields, and the shields acquired their own charges. The bordure of castles arrived with a Castilian marriage in the thirteenth century.

Either way, the design has been in continuous use for eight hundred years, which makes it one of the oldest national arms in Europe — and it is still, unchanged in essentials, at the centre of the Portuguese flag.

Portugal's heraldic manuscripts are exceptional, and all three of the major ones survive.

• The Livro do Armeiro-Mor, completed in 1509 for King Manuel I by João do Cró. It is one of the finest illuminated armorials in Europe, covering the arms of the kingdoms of Christendom and then, at length, the Portuguese nobility. It is held at the Torre do Tombo and it is digitised.
• The Livro da Nobreza e Perfeiçam das Armas of António Godinho, compiled around 1521–41 — arguably the more beautiful of the two, and the standard reference for Portuguese family arms of the period.
• The Livro do Torneio of 1552, recording the arms displayed at a royal tournament.

A country with three armorials of that quality, all surviving and all digitised, is unusually well served.

• The crest is standard, not optional. Portuguese achievements almost always show helm, mantling (paquife) and crest (timbre) together — the crest is treated as an integral part of the arms rather than an accessory.
• Highly codified differencing. Portuguese heraldry developed an unusually strict system of brisuras for distinguishing branches, and a formal law of armas de aliança governing how arms combine on marriage. It is closer to Scottish practice than to English in this respect.
• The Order crosses. The crosses of the Orders of Christ, Avis and Santiago are everywhere in Portuguese heraldry, reflecting how much of the country's medieval military and colonial apparatus ran through the military orders. The Cross of Christ went on the sails of the ships of the discoveries.
• The armillary sphere, the emblem of Manuel I and of the age of navigation, which remains on the Portuguese flag.

Nobility and titles were abolished with the Republic in 1910, and Portugal has had no state heraldic authority for private arms since. Private bodies maintain the records; the Army's heraldic office handles military and some civic arms.

This is the trap, and it catches almost everyone.

Portuguese people traditionally carry two surnames: the mother's family name first, and the father's last.

So in Ana Ferreira Mendes, Ferreira comes from her mother and Mendes is the paternal surname — and Mendes is what she is filed and addressed under.

This is the reverse of the Spanish convention, where the father's name comes first. Mixing the two up is the single most common error in Iberian research, and records in English-speaking countries frequently drop one surname entirely or reverse the pair.

Portuguese names can also run to three or four surnames, picking up grandparents' names, and married women historically added the husband's name at the end rather than replacing anything.

Where the names come from

• Patronymic, ending in -es — the oldest layer, where -es means "son of": Fernandes (son of Fernando), Gonçalves, Rodrigues, Lopes, Álvares, Martins, Dias, Nunes, Henriques, Mendes.
• Toponymic — Braga, Guimarães, Coimbra, Barcelos, and the descriptive landscape names Costa (coast), Ribeiro (riverside), Serra (ridge), Campos (fields), Fonseca (dry spring), Fontes (springs).
• Tree and plant names — a distinctively Portuguese category, and a very large one: Silva (woodland or bramble — the most common Portuguese surname in the world), Oliveira (olive tree), Pereira (pear tree), Carvalho (oak), Pinheiro (pine), Figueiredo (fig grove), Macieira (apple tree).
• Religious — Santos (saints), Cruz (cross), Jesus, Espírito Santo, Assunção, Conceição, Anunciação. These were often given at baptism to foundlings, and also adopted at forced conversion.

The ten most common Portuguese surnames — Silva, Santos, Ferreira, Pereira, Oliveira, Costa, Rodrigues, Martins, Jesus, Sousa — cover a very large share of the population, and every one of them was adopted independently by an enormous number of unrelated families.

A part of Portuguese family history that is unusually well documented, for an unhappy reason.

In 1497 Manuel I ordered the forced conversion of Portugal's Jews, creating the class of cristãos-novos, New Christians. Many took toponymic or religious surnames at conversion — which is why a proportion of Portuguese families bearing names like Santos, Cruz, Oliveira, Pereira or Mendes have a converso line behind them, and why no surname alone can establish this either way.

The Portuguese Inquisition, active from 1536 to 1821, then generated one of the most detailed genealogical archives in Europe. Its processes recorded ancestry in extraordinary depth — names, places, occupations, relationships, often across four generations — because proving or disproving descent was the point.

Those records are held at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, they are catalogued by name, and they are digitised and free. For any Portuguese family of the period they are worth searching whether or not you expect to find anything.

Portuguese surnames travelled further than the country's size suggests: to Brazil above all, and to Goa, Macau, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde; then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the United States — the whaling ports of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Central Valley of California, and Hawaii — as well as to Canada, Venezuela, France and Luxembourg.

Azorean and Madeiran emigration is a distinct strand with its own excellent records, held separately from mainland ones.

• The Livro do Armeiro-Mor (1509) and Godinho's Livro da Nobreza — digitised at the Torre do Tombo.
• The Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo generally, including the Inquisition processes and the Habilitações — the background investigations made into candidates for the military orders, which are essentially certified genealogies.
• District archives (Arquivos Distritais), which hold parish registers from the sixteenth century — most digitised and free.
• The Registo Civil, compulsory from 1911.
• Azorean and Madeiran archives, separately, for island families.

For a Portuguese name the useful question is which of the two surnames you are actually tracing, and from which district — because Silva or Santos on its own points at everywhere and therefore nowhere.

The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — where it comes from, what it meant, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains which parts come from public records and which our system builds.

Display the arms in a framed coat of arms, or carry the crest on a signet ring.