Alleged Conlisk/Cunliss/Quinlish Coat of Arms Debunked

A heraldic-products vendor, House of Names AKA Hall of Names (Swyrich Corp.), has been claiming for years that there is a coat of arms for Conlish, Quinlish, and related names (the same one for all of them). This claim seemed dubious, because no arms for any such name can be found in any reliable sources on Irish (or British) heraldry, and the features strongly suggested they were ecclesiastical not secular arms.

Thanks to the College of Heralds in London, the arms have been tracked down in detail, and they are those of the Church of Ireland Bishopric of Clonfert in Galway, and have nothing to do with any of families of these or related surnames.

Details are now in the “Heraldry” page.

By Stanton McCandlish

I am the Cuindlis.org site administrator and presently its principal writer/researcher. Based in Oakland, California (though I spent my early childhood in the UK, and have also lived in five US states, as well as Ontario, Canada), I am an IT consultant, book author, and genealogist, I've been doing a one-name study of Cuindlis-derived names like McCandlish, McCanless, and Conlisk since the 1990s. I also designed the McCandlish tartans, back in 1992 (with consultation from one of the then-living tartan experts). I have a degree in cultural anthropology and linguistics. I'm learning Scottish Gaelic and previously studied Irish Gaelic a bit, though am not fluent in either yet. On the side, I'm also something of a tartan and Highland-dress scholar, and have amassed most of the quality material published on the subject, primarily for overhauling Wikipedia's coverage of the subject. I started with the article "Tartan", which I re-did from the ground up and will next be splitting into sub-articles. Other family lines I'm researching including Skinner, Foster, Bomar, Ward, and Scott, though only particular lineages (not as broad one-name studies).

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