The Keep Family Project

Welcome to The Keep Family Website.   If you are researching the Keep, Kep, Kepe, or Keepe family, this website is dedicated to you and is intended to help you find information about your ancestry.  By navigating through the site, useful and interesting historical background about the Keep family will be found to assist genealogists as well as any Keep interested in the family.

The site is intended to be a meeting place for all Keep family members around the world  regardless of relationship and family line.  It is not an association requiring membership, and it can be of use for all with the surname of Keep and its variations.

Aims of the Project

~~The Search for the Ancestry of John Keep of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, killed by Indians 1676.  Although the project is still very much in its infancy, there has already been one notable and remarkable discovery.  DNA testing has established that John Keep is a descendant of Walter Kep of England.  His roots had been a mystery unsolved by genealogists for over 300 years.  While the direct line to Walter remains to be discovered, it links the Keeps on both sides of the Atlantic.  While an amazing breakthrough, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done through DNA testing and research.

~~The Search for the Descendants of Walter Kep of Astwood, Buckinghamshire, England, b. 1230. The exact position of John on Walter's ancestral line is being sought.  In addition, the first attempt will be made to discover the roots, relationships, and ancestry of all American and English Keeps and the widely-distributed family through DNA testing and research.

~~The Keep DNA Project.  In order to fulfill the original aims of this project, it was accepted that an alternative would be needed to the traditional paper-trail methods which have failed genealogists for so long.  The Y-chromosome DNA of males with the surname Keep (and its variants) is being traced to establish the genetic links of these two ancestors.  The Project has been expanded to include all Keeps of all family lines for the purpose of establishing connections in this world-wide family.

~~A Meeting Place for All Keeps.  This website will serve as a meeting place for all Keep family members. Special pages offer the opportunity  to post inquiries and to share family histories as well as notable events in those histories. The participation of all Keeps is eagerly invited.

How You Can Help

The participation and assistance of a considerable number of people connected to the Keep family (and variants of that name) to take part in the project is essential for success.  Family Tree DNA, a reputable testing laboratory used by many family projects, has been chosen for this work.  The FTDNA laboratory is located at, and in association with, the Arizona Research Lab at the University of Arizona, one of the most respected genetics labs in the world.  The organizers of this website project have no financial interest in testing and are Keep family volunteers.

In addition, help is needed in the contribution of family history information in order to help fill the voids that now exist in our Keep family lines.

For More Information

Please read the historical and technical information, mostly relatively simple, on the following pages.  Links to other family associations with excellent in-depth information on the subject of DNA are provided.  Until an interactive bulletin board is established, queries, information transmissions, suggestions, etc., must be done by email, information found on the Contacts page.

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Because there is a suggestion that the Keep Family originated in Saxony in the distant past,  the following paragraph in German is to assist any potential family members from that region to translate the web-pages into German.

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Administrators of this website:

Marcus F. Keep, MD, Colorado, USA

John Keep, London

Robert S. Warner, New York

Paul E. Keep, California

See the Contacts page. 

Email Robert, webmaster, for comments and suggestions about the website.