Coat of Arms finalized!

At long last, after learning all sorts of cool things I can do with the Gimp,

I finally completed the design for my personal Coat of Arms!

Hooray!

Now I need to find a place that will produce a nice hand-painted plaque with

a customer-supplied design. The services I've run across have no mechanism

to handle a customer-supplied design; they only offer packages where they

design the thing themselves based on the customer's last name.

My research into heraldry traditions revealed that a coat of arms was supposed

to be different for each individual, though each son's version was based

on his father's (and grandfather's, great-grandfather's, etc.) design in a specific

manner. Then when the father died, the eldest son adopted his father's design

but the other sons continued to use their modified versions.

The various traditions also morphed over time and weren't really followed

consistently in many cases, so ultimately I decided that it's entirely appropriate

for me to design my own coat of arms based on my ancestral lineages, and

to evolve the heraldric traditions in accordance with societal evolution that

has occurred since medieval times.

In today's society, women are no longer thought of as second-class citizens.

In light of that, I've incorporated both my father's (Abreau) and my mother's

(Moran) family crest designs into my shield, in the manner commonly used
when two different kingdoms were joined together by marriage. I've affixed
a "mullet" (5-point star) to indicate that I'm my parents' third son; I've replaced
the armored helmet with a blue fedora; and instead of choosing an animal to
represent my basic virtues, I chose instead two of my intellectual heroes:
Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Darwin.