Monday, March 24, 2008

Question from Holly - Title for daughter of a Lord

How would one address oneself if one happened to be the daughter of a Lord?

4 comments:

Lara said...

I'm definitely not an expert on the forms of address, but I think in a lot of cases a daughter would be a "Lady". For example, Princess Diana was "Lady Diana" before she was married because she was the daughter of an earl. I'm not sure if this applies to daughters of barons, but I'm guessing it would apply to daughters of dukes and marquesses.

Anonymous said...

Hi~
This information was taken from Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/peeerage#hereditary_peers):

"Individuals who use the style Lord or Lady are not necessarily peers. Children of peers use special titles called courtesy titles. The eldest son of a duke, a marquess, or an earl generally uses his father's highest lesser peerage dignity as his own. Hence, the Duke of Devonshire's son is called Marquess of Hartington. Such an eldest son is called a courtesy peer, but is a commoner.

Younger sons of dukes and marquesses prefix Lord to their first names as courtesy titles. Daughters of dukes, marquesses and earls use Lady, and younger sons of earls and children of viscounts, barons and lords of Parliament use The Honourable."

Therefore, I would gather from this information that a child (as it says, "children of")of a baron, viscount, or lord of Parliment would be The Honourable, not Lady or Lord.

You might want to take a visit to this site as peerage can be quite involved, especially when addressing an individual with a hereditary title and members of his or her family. Then, just when you think you have made some sense of it all, there's a whole other set of rules used when addressing female Lordships in the Scottish Parliment...it figures...
Hope this helps.
Emmengarde

Anonymous said...

I think it would be the honorable

Anonymous said...

I think it would still be a lady, or it might be the honorable