Blazon Search is the fruit of frustration -- frustration that many genealogy and heraldry researchers go through on their quest for the past. It's the frustration of inadequate resources. When our own genealogical research pointed to possible arms existing in the family, the search was on. Quickly we found that Rietstap's Armorial Général was the standard reference for European arms. However, we couldn't find a copy online, and it took even quite a while to find a library that carried one (which could not be taken home). The prospect of digging through hundreds of pages looking for particular arms at a library half an hour from home wasn't particularly attractive. If there would just be a searchable digital version...

When we found that many people would love to see such a resource, especially with the capability to search the blazons, we decided to make it reality. Several months of scanning and coding later the first version went online. It was a success. Several code extensions followed and Blazon Search (then called Armorial Online) quickly became the one-stop online search tool for Rietstap's Armorial Général. Now people could use it for searching both names and blazons at lightning speed. No more long library visits or hefty prices for rare hard copies.

We initially put the service up for free. We really wanted this to be a research tool without screaming and blinking advertisements taking up most of the bandwidth. A few months later, in an attempt to offset some of our development and maintenance expenses, we appealed to the hundreds of users to help us out with donations. A year and a half went by, after which we had received a total of 70 US$ -- despite having hundreds of people from several libraries worldwide using the service daily. To keep the resource online, yet make it worthwhile to develop and expand, we switched to a subscriber based system in November of 2005. This has allowed us to keep working on many exciting new features that we hope to add in the near future.

The Armorial Online was renamed to Blazon Search. With that, its services were moved to a new domain and webhost, and the website was re-designed. Besides this new site design, an English translation of the Armorial Général is in the pipeline, as well as the addition of many public-domain illustrations of the blazons from Henri and Victor Rolland's Illustrations to the Armorial Général. A longer term project is the addition of a fully searchable public-domain version of Burke's General Armory and an extensive Heraldic Glossary based on the works of a.o. Burke and Rietstap, as well as support documentation from both the Armorial Général and Burke's General Armory. So stay tuned!

If you wish to help us with these efforts, please do so with donations. It will help us purchase necessary books and equipment. Your contributions are much appreciated!