The house enters the record in 1877, when Elizabeth Magdalene Humphries married at Worcester in the Cape. Where her family came from before that, nobody has yet traced. In 2026 the record asked the old English books of arms about the name.
What was asked
Do the old English books record arms for the family of Elizabeth Magdalene Humphries — a coat this house could call its own?
Where we looked
The great English register was asked, and the page that carries the name in all its spellings — Humphrey, Humphreys, Humphries and the rest — was brought up and read by eye, name by name.
Burke’s General Armory, 1884
the book that gathers every family in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales known to bear arms, and lists them by name
It holds about ten families across the spellings of the name — in Leicester, Gloucester, Wales, London, Essex and Ireland — and one general coat bundled across five spellings. None of them can be tied to this house.
The book holds about ten coats under the name’s spellings, and not one of them can be tied to this house. There are Humphreys of Leicester and of Gloucester, a Bishop of Bangor, a Lord Mayor of London, families in Wales, in Essex and in Ireland — and the book even bundles five spellings of the name into one general coat, its own way of admitting that the name spread far beyond any single family.
Nothing connects any of them to a bride at Worcester in the Cape in 1877, because nobody yet knows where her people came from. So the record chooses none of them, and least of all the general coat — a coat for everyone of a name is a coat for no one's family in particular.
What would settle it
- The one question that unlocks the rest: where Elizabeth Magdalene’s people came from. With a county in hand, the book's list shrinks to at most one family; without one, it is only a list.
- Something in the family’s own hands — a ring, a seal, a bookplate, or a story that there were arms.
- The state’s own register of arms in South Africa, where a coat granted or registered in the last century would be written down.
What we would like from the family
Anything real: a ring, a seal, a bookplate, a letterhead, something painted or carved — or simply a story that the family had arms, and what they looked like. If there is nothing, that is an answer too, and the record will say so plainly.
There is more on the page of things only you can tell us.