II The family

The family coat of arms

We know what the Kingma coat of arms looks like thanks to the Regina church in Zweins and archival records. The shield is divided vertically. The half on the viewer’s left shows a Frisian half eagle sable on or; in heraldry this is called the dexter (right) half, because a coat of arms is described from the point of view of the person bearing the shield (De Kinkhoorn 2). The other half is divided horizontally: above, two conch shells sable on argent; below, an arrow argent on azure. The crest is a swan’s neck issuant.

The Kingma coat of arms, with and without the Frisian half eagle — The Kingma arms: on the left the later version with the Frisian half eagle, on the right the probably older version without the eagle. Drawing from the circle of the Fryske Rie foar Heraldyk (Frisian Heraldry Council), brought along by J.C. Terluin for his lecture on heraldry in Zweins on 20 November 2004.

The Kingma coat of arms, cleaned-up drawing with two triton shells — The Kingma coat of arms, cleaned-up drawing (2026), with triton shells as in the blazon of 1842.

It is suspected that the shells in the coat of arms are connected with the name Kingma (originally Kinghum): the Dutch word is ‘kinkhoorn’, from kink, a twist, so a twisted, spiral horn. Today the word mainly means the whelk, but in the seventeenth century a kinkhoorn was any large twisted sea shell that looked like a horn, above all the horn blown by the sea god Triton; that is why the shells are called triton shells in the blazon of 1842. Whether the shells really have anything to do with the name is uncertain; see The name and the conch shells. In another, probably older version of the coat of arms the Frisian half eagle is missing. When the eagle was added is not known; Frisian families began to include the half eagle in their arms in the fifteenth century (De Kinkhoorn 11).

The Kingma coat of arms on a loose stone in the floor of the church at Zweins — The Kingma coat of arms on a loose stone that was laid in the floor of the church at Zweins during the restoration; the stone probably does not come from the church itself. The arms on the Kingma gravestones themselves were largely chiselled off in 1796.

The crest with the swan, in the church at Zweins.