De Saffia Family

The De Saffia Family
"Rise and Rise Again"
Historical Information
Ancestral house	House Saffo (extinct)
Founder	Lady Sophey de Saffia (formerly Saffo)
Established	~3900 BCGT
General information
Current head	Ymma de Saffia
Affiliation	Serenno
Homeworld	Serenno
Species	Human

The De Saffia family is a Human bloodline from the planet Serenno in the D'astan sector. As their name suggests, the De Saffias originally come from the city of Saffia on their homeworld, and have resided within its confines for numerous generations. Nonetheless, members of this family have spread across Serenno over the course of history, with branches currently residing in the major cities of their home planet, such as Carannia and Fiyarro. Yet, the members of the main line of the De Saffias - including their family head - continue to reside within the city of Saffia.

The family had originally been founded around 3900 BCGT as a cadet branch of House Saffo, an aristocratic bloodline with a number of minor titles and holdings in and around the city of Saffia. By the time the De Saffias split off from the Saffo family, the latter was already on the verge of extinction. Through political guile and intrigue, the De Saffias managed to inherit much of the wealth and lands that House Saffo had owned, before that bloodline was truly rendered extinct under the Saffo name. More than two centuries later, during the Great Galactic War between the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire, the De Saffia family had aligned itself with the Sith forces occupying Serenno, which had earned them a landed title at that time. After the Sith Empire's collapse however, the fortunes of the De Saffias similarly fell, and the family went through a brief period of obscurity before reclaiming some of their lost prominence several generations later. In the millennia that followed, the status, position, and influence of the De Saffia bloodline would ebb and flow like the tides of the Belsallian Sea, which is what eventually shaped the family's official motto "Rise and Rise Again".

Following the end of the Clone Wars, the De Saffia family slowly but gradually started to see its fortunes rise once more, after a long period of decline. While the bloodline holds no titles in the present - landed or otherwise - its members managed to secure respectable positions as local politicians, bankers, lawyers, and independent entrepreneurs, which firmly entrenched the De Saffias within the upper half of the Serennian middle class in recent decades. This success largely stems from a new custom that arose within the family over the last couple of generations, in which individual members of the De Saffia family have to set out and forge their own fortune and career without relying upon family ties or wealth. This ensures that each individual relative is a strong, independent part of the family collective, while the weaker elements remain cut off and are unable to weaken the whole. This earned the De Saffias a local reputation of being a family of utilitarian pragmatists with a tenacious but callous streak.

The Family Emblem

The emblem of the De Saffia family is a medallion with a golden outer edge and a cyan background on the inside of the medallion. The image of two intertwining Tirra'Takas - mythical dragon-like creatures that legends say had once roamed across Serenno - is placed within the middle of the cyan circle, and represents the family's cohesion as strong but independent parts of a whole. Many members of the bloodline wear the family crest engraved on a ring, necklace, or other piece of jewellery. Similarly, many De Saffia relatives choose their personal colours from the golden and cyan emblem that represents their lineage, with cyan in combination with another colour such as black, silver, or white being the most commonly picked option.

Supposedly, the family crest is a variation of the heraldic emblem of House Saffo, which featured multiple golden Tirra'Taka heads emerging from the middle. The derived crest was adopted by Lady Sophey de Saffia (formerly Saffo) upon breaking off from the Saffo bloodline as a cadet branch. The two Tirra'Taka heads represented herself and her husband, Lord Consort Charlys de Saffia (née Lecyllath), as their own independent family unit. The De Saffias held onto the design of Lady Sophey's crest, with each generation adding its own symbolic connotations to it in the millennia that followed.

Genealogy

De Saffia ancestors

Julias ♂ †

Ymma de Saffia ♀

Rolf de Saffia ♂

Nessa ♀

Aliss ♀

Daan de Saffia ♂

Ossav ♂

Heylen de Saffia ♀

Iryss ♀ †

Timm de Saffia ♂

Karal de Saffia ♂

Lidaa ♀

Marey de Saffia ♀

Laari ♂

Julary de Saffia ♀

Evalyn de Saffia ♀

Rens de Saffia ♂

Demy de Saffia ♀

Hugo de Saffia ♂

Gysell de Saffia ♀

Bartan de Saffia ♂

Evard de Saffia ♂

Saraa de Saffia ♀

Ireen de Saffia ♀