. An agent from London was employed in a search for
a pedigree. He, by fraudulent means, concocted a very
plausible story. Genealogies were manufactured, tombs
were desecrated, registers were falsified, wills were
forged--in a word, various outrages were committed, with
many sacred things in this parish and elsewhere. These
two figures, as part of the pedigree, were deposited in a
niche in the chantry; on either side were huge brass
tablets on which were engraven various untruthful and
unfounded statements."

In another case Hughenden Church was desecrated to gratify the vanity of
a family of Wellesbourne, anxious to trace their descent from the
Montforts.

"They caused a monumental effigy of an imaginary ancestor
to be carved in the style of the thirteenth century
...they adapted the plate-armour effigy to their purpose
by cutting similar arms on the skirts, and they had three
rude effigies fabricated by way of filling up the gaps
between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries."

To give but two more out of many cases of similar imposture, the
Deardens, many years ago, actually had a family chapel constructed in
Rochdale Church with sham effigies, slabs, and brasses to the memory of
wholly fictitious ancestors; while in two Scottish churches altar-tombs
were placed to the memory of successive apocryphal lairds of Coulthart.
Such are the lengths to which a craze for ancestry has carried some
unprincipled persons; and there is no doubt that the arts of the forger
are still enlisted in the service of people who crave long descent and
do not scruple as to the methods by which they attain it.

Happily, however, the mania for ancestors does not often take such
extreme and reprehensible forms; its manifestations are usually rather
amusing than criminal. A common weakness is, however plebeian and
obvious in its origin a surname may be, to dignify it with a Norman or
at least French cradle. Thus we are solemnly assured that the Smithsons
(a name which bluntly proclaims its own derivation) are "a branch of the
baronial family of Scalers, or De Scallariis, which flourished in
Aquitaine as long ago as the eighth century." The first Cooper was not,
as the unlearned might imagine, a modest if respectable tradesman of
that name--no, he was a member of the great house of De Columbers, one
of whom was "Le Cupere, being probably Cup-bearer to the King"; Pind