Tags: Noble.
Quarters of nobility is an expression used in the bestowal of hereditary titles and refers to the number of generations in which noble status has been held by a family regardless of whether a title was actually in use by each person in the ancestral line in question.For example a person having sixteen quarterings (formally in heraldry Seize Quartiers) might have exclusively noble ancestry for the four previous generations (i.e. to the great-great-grandparent level): Given two parents per generation four generations of uninterrupted nobility = 24 = 16.