Tim: I am trying to fill in some blanks on my Keen Family Tree and I find that you have some of the names that I believe belong on it. I have found information that the earliest de Keyne family member was Guillaume de Cahaignes, who was called William de Cahaignes in England. You have a William de Chaganes I who is married to an Adelais Unknown. Do you know if your William the same as Guillaume de Cahaignes AKA William de Cahaignes. I have also found information that Guiallume/William was the father of 3 sons: Ralph, Hugh and William. Is there any connection between Hugh de Keynes I and the son of Guillaume.

"I have other questions, but I don‘t want to overload you with them. But there is one mystery you might be able to solve for me. When I first discovered that there might be a connection to the de Keynes, it was through a (very) great grandmother, Agnes Moysier, born in 1450 at Burford, Oxfordshire marrying one John Chesney. My research discovered that 7 members of that tree were listed as de Keynes and not de Chesney‘s in the Netherlands, Genealogie Online Tree and Millennium File. Why is this?

My response was:

I am not sure what you have found on my site. You could have found all three of these:

• (a) "http://powys.org/Genealogy/articles/SsxArcCol_v63_pp180-202.pdf" Keynes of Sussex
• (b) "http://powys.org/Genealogy/articles/SsxArcCol_v65_pp20-53.pdf" Chesneys of Sussex
• (c) "http://powys.org/pl_tree/wc29/wc29_271.html" William I de Cahagnes

[Readers: please note that these site references will no longer work when I next rebuild my site database.]

The last is all that I suspect you have found to date. I suspect your questions may mostly be answered in the first two of these three parts.

The real question is about sources. Your genealogy MUST proceed by identifying source documents of the times of the people concerned. You should list the source documents that my material includes reference to and the source documents that you have for your material. If they are much the same for much the same name then it is likely that both my documents and yours refer to the same person. So your questions are answerable.

There is no problem about different spellings and very different names in different countries. It was only in the later 18th century that Samuel Johnson started the standardisation of English spelling. If you read original documents of earlier centuries you may realise that people spelled as they heard from people who talked with a wide range of regional accents. So their spellings were different on different occasions. Even William Shakespeare is known to have spelled his name in three different ways.

I have a weak knowledge of English, not to mention Latin and any other language. Also I was weak at history. But I have soon found that genealogy requires a good understanding of languages and a good knowledge of history and social and legal customs through the ages. Unfortunately this has only managed to encourage me to give up medieval genealogy as I simply do not have the skills required for it. The only thing us English do have is the fair number of people who have made it their business to study and quote from the few documents that have survived!

I wonder have you found where I list my source documents on my web-site? It is always on the drilled-down page for each person, headed 'Person Sheet', eg "http://powys.org/pl_tree/ps42/ps42_345.html" for William 1 de Cahaignes. Then look at the first line and in red is the comma-separated list of each separate reference document. The number or digits at the beginning of each reference can be clicked on to show the name of the source. After this source number on the Person Sheet is the details of how to find the information in that document or source. Can you confirm in any reply that you have got the hang of my source listings?

What I would then advise you to do is to get hold of your copy of those source documents and see if you can see that I have got the right details for the person concerned. For the Keyneses and Chesneys of Sussex, of course, you need only grab the documents, as above in (a) and (b), from my web-site.

If you have found other source documents of the times of the people concerned that give a different account of their genealogy, please let me know soonest so that I may review the matter and update my master files as necessary.

Any questions?