Heraldrywiki:About

Click here for the Annual overview of the site
HERALDRY OF THE WORLD : The main resource for civic heraldry since 1995

About Heraldry of the World / Heraldrywiki

The site is my private site, which is maintained by one person only in my spare time. The site deals only with civic heraldry, but I intend to include also other non personal heraldry, such as from universities, registered arms of companies, institutions etc. I also have by now included a large catalogue of collector's items as well as a large literature list on civic heraldry.

My interest in (civic) heraldry started already at a young age, I have no idea anymore what triggered my interest. In the 1980s I started to draw all Dutch civic arms by myself on paper. In the early 1990s this was transferred to electronic files and I started to draw the Dutch arms on-line.

At the end of 1995 a colleague of mine started an internet provider service and he offered me some web space. The site was launced in October/November 1995 with the address of www.teleoffice.nl/ngw/index.htm. The abbreviation ngw, which is still used, stands for Nederlandse GemeenteWapens (Dutch municipal arms). The domain teleoffice.nl is now being used by another company.

To see how the site looked in 1996 click here.

The company teleoffice went broke and I needed a new sponsor. A separate .nl domain name for an individual was at the time not allowed, and being a student, also too expensive. In 1998 I found the Bank of Dutch Municipalities (www.bng.nl) willing to sponsor the webspace. The site at the time was already dealing with international civic heraldry as well and was being translated into English. In 1999 the bank applied for the domain name www.ngw.nl, which was introduced in 2000. In the meantime the name was changed to International Civic Arms and later to International Civic Heraldry.

See here for the look of the site in 1998 and here for 2003 and here for 2006.

In 2004 the bank stopped the sponsoring and the domain name was transferred to me. In 2006-7 I had hardly any time to make additions to the site, but I revived my activities in 2008.

In 2005 I also started with the website www.heraldryshop.biz to sell CDs and duplicate materials from my own collection. I also started to create a catalogue of heraldic collector's items at the same site. As this started to become the main activity of that site, I decided to merge both sites.

On January 2009 I merged both sites to the new name Heraldry of the World still with domain name www.ngw.nl. The website www.heraldryshop.biz was removed.

Of course I do not do all the work completely alone, I have during the years received much information from a number of people, see contributors. I have no income from the site except from some advertisements on the left of the screen.