The Crest

By Paula Schleis

The Schleises in Ohio could never find a family crest, so they gave up looking and just made one themselves. Paula Schleis was commissioned by her father, Stephen Schleis, to somehow portray the Schleis family history of the past three centuries. On Sept. 8, 1996, Paula completed the mission.

Here's the explanation, moving clockwise on the crest:

  • The mountains represent Germany, where our roots begin. For the Schleis family, the sun set on Germany some 250 years ago, when they set out as pioneers for the unpopulated Austro-Hungarian swamplands in Eastern Europe.

  • The flax being collected with the horse and wagon show our agricultural heritage during our nearly 200-year stay in Hungary and Croatia. Farming was a way of life, and the flax a staple crop.

  • At the turn of the century, several family members sailed to America, landing in New York City. There, they were taken by train - also a symbol of our move from farmlands to industrial cities - into the Heartland. There, they planted new roots.

  • The water divides all three homelands and represents both the Danube River, which we sailed to Hungary, and the Atlantic Ocean, our waterway to the New World.

  • The birds represent the future - our willingness to go where God sees fit while flying high enough to see where we've been before. For our family, four birds is significant, since our four grandparents - including the surnames of Seigfried, Schnitzler and Willig - followed this identical path and have been closely connected ever since.

  • The blood red sky symbolizes the family members who did not leave the former Yugoslavia before World War II, meeting with hardship - and even death - when all Germans were hastily evicted from the country they called home.

  • And finally, like one ties a string around a finger to remind oneself of something important, the knot reminds us that our history was our heritage, and the legacy for our children.

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