A family nearly 800 years in the making - and Valkyries!

An exciting development into my family origins research happened this week. I had put the research on a halt of nearly a year (life just got busy!), and in the meantime, some of the museum records that I had been using as references were updated and the first Wiarda on the record is now back to circa 1245! The only thing known is that his name is Pybe Wiarda, and his estimated birth year is 1245, and that he fathered at least one child (Doecke Pybes Dooitsen van Wiarda in 1280) but not much else is known.

This reignited the spark in me. I'm so excited to once again delve into all the information I can gather about this great big family. I started looking a bit more into the family crest, and the clan I'm part of is defined by this variant of the design:

The Swan in the design is seen very early on in the family records, as depicted on the shield of Sjoerd Wiarda. The choice of this bird, in addition to the thorny adornment on its neck is believed to be because, at that time, the wild swans were associated with Valkyries in most of Europe (including Friesland), and therefore believed to be powerful animals. The choice of colour blue is to represent water, as the region where the family originated (as far as we know), in Friesland, was a coastal region, and its ports and major water routes turned it into a very strategically placed and resourceful land. Interestingly, much of Friesland is also situated below sea level.