Westerland Dynastic Traditions

In the real world, Dynastic Traditions were considerably more complex, and more important in the past than they are now. Today, we associate the word Dynasty with a legacy, often a company that has stayed within the same family for generations - but that is not the correct use of this word. A dynasty (in this specific context) is a family-tree or a pedigree, but more specifically, it is a named and labeled family-tree or pedigree; hence the association with family-owned businesses, which also tend to utilize names and labels to identify themselves with their legacies.

Dynastic Traditions are an important aspect of Westerland Society and Culture.

Dynastic Continuation Rules
In the real world, every society had its own rules for how a Dynasty could continue and carry on. These rules were often changed, made exceptions to and sometimes entirely ignored, while at other times they were observed extremely religiously. In the Westerlands, due to the Westerlands having a shared heritage as Imperial Provinces for the most part, the Dynastic Continuation Rules are fairly unanimous.

The concept of a Household
A Household is to mean the immediate family of an established Patrician (a married person with children), including that person's parents (only if they live in that person's house or on the land that comes with it), any unmarried siblings and unmarried children. A household can also include first cousins, first nephews/nieces and grandchildren, but only if these are fostered due to loss, etc., and such fostered individuals do not necessarily inherit any rights or status granted unto the Household, but will count toward it for tax purposes and can help fulfill obligations.
 * The head of a Household is called a Patrician, and one is required to formally record a Household upon being married and siring a child, with the exception that a father may retain one son in his household, if that son is the designated heir, regardless of how many children the son has, and whether or not he is married.
 * The Patrician is not necessarily a man, but it does default to being the man in the union. In times of war, the wife often becomes the patrician, or if the man is of poor health.
 * The Patrician owns all property belonging to the Household, but is also required to provide a dowry for all women who are wed from that Household.
 * Apart from the law and actual obligations, the Patrician has authority over other members of the household and can, for instance, demand of them to take a job somewhere and pay their earnings to the household or to do certain chores, etc.
 * By law, an unmarried man with no children cannot obtain property, unless this property has been given to him by a higher authority as a reward, but this law is rarely observed and a man who wishes to form his own household by buying his own property in his own name is usually allowed to do so.

Documentation
For a person to count as documented, there had to be a record of whom their parents were, and where they had been born, which was signed by someone who could be trusted as an authority (typically a government official, a noble with a title or a member of the clergy), but any married couple would become documented by the time they moved to a settlement, though themselves not necessarily counting as properly documented, their children would count as such. If a local couple was wed in a given settlement, and neither party was either documented properly prior to the union, it also would not benefit themselves, but would benefit their children.
 * Those who did not count as properly documented could not be trusted to own any property at all and were doomed to live as proletarians, completely under the law of the local authority - though in later eras, those poorly documented were not held to such ancient laws and were instead usually just forced to live outside of the cities.

Naming conventions
The Gentry and Nobility typically followed different naming conventions than those of the low-born. Among the Low-Born, it was common to take a number of identifying names.

Given Name
Naturally, they had a given name, and in some regions, they also had, what was called, an Imperial Name, which was often chosen by means of a system that had been predetermined, based on what letters appeared in the chosen Given name.
 * The Imperial Name existed because some local cultures had names that, confusingly, might sound identical to certain Imperial Words, or were impossible to spell or pronounce in the Imperial Tongue, so they simply decided that those from the provinces could have two first names.
 * In the Post-Imperial Era, it just became a tradition, and the Imperial Name was given regardless of what culture the first-name was from.

Maiden Names
A woman changes Last-Name when she is married. A Maiden-Name will appear in the marriage record, but is otherwise not noted anywhere, however, the woman's Middle-Name along with the Maiden-Name from her marriage record can be used to trace her lineage.

Middle-Name
The middle name was always the Given name of the first man to appear in the Bloodline as recorded, so siblings would all have the same Middle-Name, if they had the same mother, but any daughters would pass on that same Middle-Name to their children, whereas the men would instead pass on their last name to theirs, who took the Middle-Name from their mothers. For middle-names, one did often not use the exact Given Name of the first man in the Bloodline, but rather a slightly modified version, with each culture having its own common way of doing this, though it was never to add "son", or "sen" to the name, as this was reserved for other uses.
 * In Novera, they shorten the name, and add "es" (if the first man in the family was Fernando, it becomes Fernandes), though it wasn't always simple to figure out exactly how to do this.
 * In the Carnala Republics, the name was shortened to the last consonant, and then "I" or "O" was simply added instead. In Orlais, with the exception of Dussante, it was common place to add an S to the name, unless it already ended with an S sound, in which case it didn't change (Jack became "Jacks").
 * In Dussante, it was commonly the traditional spoken form of the Given name.
 * Rivera tended to mix between the two traditions of Orlais and Dussante.
 * In the Marklands, there was no set tradition, and most had imported a tradition from a neighboring country, though often Orlais or Dussante.
 * The namesake of a middle-name is often misunderstood to be the husband of the first documented woman, from whom the bloodline sprang, but in reality it refers to that woman's father's given name, and these names are inherited matrilineally only.
 * Middle-Names are not used outside of particularly formal occasions.
 * If a woman doesn't know what her Middle-Name is, she can use the name of her father (if that is known), but adds "en" to it, or "ren" if the name ends with an "s" sound (Jack becomes "Jacken").
 * If impossible to devise a Middle-Name this way, the woman will simply be given one by the record keeping authority, almost always named after a Saint, so that "St." appears in front of the Middle-Name.

Last-name
Last-names are also based on the first man to appear in the recorded bloodline, but are inherited paternally, with women taking the last-name of their husbands and giving up the last-name of their fathers to do so. They follow the exact same naming convention as Middle-Names, even down to the same traditions.

Parentage name
Because the establishing Patrician of a Household is always a man, within a local community, a child is identified by such. The children of a man named Jack are called Jacksen (not Son), as "sen" indicates descendancy from a paternal figure. These names are primary identifiers in a local setting.

Birth Place
Within the same County or equivalent subdivision of land, it is illegal for there to be two settlements of the same name. When a person is within the same subdivision of land, they can use a birth-place name, and while the place name is fairly straight forward, exactly how this name is formed varies from culture to culture. Such names seem like they might be useless if a person was to leave their birth-county, but due to local traditions, they sometimes end up being even more significant and notable than any other names.
 * In Noverra, they say "d'Al" in front of the placename, which is a strange combination of North-Rahamran traditions and Dussantean traditions, stemming from both cultures having influences Noverra a great deal in its early days. The contraction of "d'Al" literally means, if translated from both languages, "from the", and makes most sense when the settlement either has "el" in front of it, which means "settlement of" (equivalent of saying "the city of" in English) in North-Rahamran. Example; "d'Al Ark", meaning from Ark.
 * In Orlais, they use "of", which is very simple. Example; "of Ark", meaning from Ark.
 * In the Marklands, they use "Vorn", literally meaning "from". Example; "Vorn Ark", meaning from Ark.
 * In Rivera, they say "Vorn del", which was actually a merging of "Vorn" as they say in the Marklands, and "d'Al". Example; "Vorn del Ark", meaning from Ark.
 * In Dussante, they use "d' " in front of the placename, which means "from". Example; "d'Ark", meaning from Ark.
 * In the Carnala Republics, they use "De" in front of a place that has a traditional Carnala name, or "Di", in front of the place name, if the name is foreign but will often morph the place name into something that suits their language better. Example; "Di Arkia", meaning from Ark.

Profession-name
Profession-names are used by anyone who has a guild endorsement. They are born with pride, and it is considered a crime to present oneself under a fake Profession-name, punishable by death in severe cases. Some few profession names could be used purely based on ownership of certain lands, and it was typically recorded in the deed to the land that this name could be carried.

Order of presentation
In this example, we have an Orlesian man by the given-name of "John" (having no Imperial Name as Orlesians eschewed this tradition when they adopted the Cosmological faith), who's last-name is "Mathews", his middle-name being "Peters", his father having had the given-name of "Tom", having been born in "Rourkesville" and his lands allowing him to carry profession-name of "Rancher" - he would be, formally, addressed as "John Peters-Mathews Tomssen of Roukesville, the Rancher", but informally typically just as "John Tomssen" locally, "John of Rourkesville" near his own settlement and "John Rancher" when introducing himself and wanting to make an impression.

Bloodlines
An aspect of Westerland Dynastic Continuation Rules, is the recognition of Bloodlines. A Bloodline is started by the first person who becomes documented with the reigning administrative authority, which depended on time-period. The continued Bloodline is always maternal, but the child of a union is documented with inclusion of the father's bloodline in the birth-record - though do not confuse Bloodlines with Households, which almost always took their namesake from the father.
 * While bloodlines are continued maternally, they are named after the first man to appear in the Bloodline, meaning that
 * Bloodlines were often interrupted when administrative errors resulted in loss, or misplacement of documentation or when people moved and couldn't afford (or risk) seeking a letter of proof of identity from their local authority.
 * If a child was the result of adultery, the parents would often try to avoid having it documented, as due to the way this was recorded, such incidences were particularly embarrassing, and were lasting embarrassments, as the husband of a woman was legally required to raise the children of the woman as his own, but the child would be entered into the records as the same bloodline as the other children of the union, but with a different father-line, and would actually have the last-name of their out-of-marriage father.

Houses
The term "House" determines, specifically, a high-born family line (meaning gentry or nobility). members of Houses had specific last names that differed from lowborn last names.
 * Generally speaking, Patricians of Houses took care not to have too many sons, so that there would not be too much contention for their family seat.
 * Second- and third sons were encouraged to seek employment in the churches (priests take new last-names, based on something holy and refrain from all inheritance rights) and as Knights or Courtiers to allied Houses, sending them away.
 * Once a person left his household effectively, he also left behind his House-Name, and would instead go by place-name, naming the specific name of the fiefdom that they hail from, though in reality, on any formal documents, they remained by their original last-name.
 * If a person from a House gained some sort of title that enabled him to form his own House, he was expected to do so, and would take a new last-name. There was no specific tradition for how this was done.
 * The moment a Patrician of a House had someone from his family branch off and form a House of their own, and this House was essentially a lasting House (many knights could not pass on their House, as there was nothing to pass on with it), he had effectively seen his house form into a Lesser Dynasty.

Lesser Dynasties
Lesser Dynasties were essentially composed of multiple Houses. The Dyansty was named after the main family, and the Dynasty could select a specific Coat-of-Arms for their Dynasty (which did not follow Westerland Heraldric Traditions), which could end up claiming a large amount of people - though Lesser Dynasties did not have permission to fly their own Dyanastic Coat of Arms, unless they were Freeholders ranked as Barons, or at least Earls ranking of Duke in standing.
 * Dynasties could be traced through both matrilineal and patrilineal relations, and it was far from uncommon that a family was effectively members of multiple Dynasties, though in polite culture, it was regarded as particularly tacky to attempt to insinuate membership in more than one Dynasty, unless one specified that one only traced heritage to one other mentioned Dynasty - the rest was for the Heralds to know.
 * By default, most high-born would affiliate with the same Dynasty as their parents, but upon marriage, the Household would have to select which Dynasty (assuming both parties brought at least one to the marriage) they would primarily feature - often defaulting to which ever is immediately more practical for their situation.
 * Claiming heritage into a Dynasty without the permission of the current Patrician or hard evidence accepted by the reigning authority in such matters was a punishable offense.
 * Out of practicality, most who could claim membership into multiple Dynasties chose whichever one was most immediately practical - that typically did not mean which ever was more prestigious, but rather which was closer and more necessary to maintain as an ally.

Greater Dynasties
Greater Dynasties were protected Dynasties, that the owners of which could not merely accept people into, nor could people simply claim heritage into them, as there could only be one reigning house in the Dynasty, unlike Lesser Dynasties, which could have an unlimited number of Houses.
 * The immediate family to the reigning house was permitted to say that they were of the Dynasty, but anyone removed more than one step was required to affiliate with other Dynasties, but were permitted to claim "heritage" to the Greater Dynasty.
 * Those who had a more distant blood relation that third step could not even say that they traced their lineage to the greater Dynasty, but it was permitted for others to say it about them, and it was permitted for them to mention that they had a distant relation.
 * While effectively, few could claim to be of the Dynasty, this was not necessarily how it was viewed. Blood relations to the Greater Dynasty were still very much remembered, even if they were not permitted to be flaunted.
 * The rules about Greater Dynasties were defined during the height of the Empire's time as a colonial power, and existed to prevent entire regions of barbarians from forming one large Tribe instead of adhering to multiple separate factions, which was what made them easy to control.
 * In addition to that, it also becomes outright problematic for arranging marriages if all houses claimed the same Dynasty.