(Anglo-French) belonging to Chancey, Chancé, or Chançay (France) [the suff. -ey, -é, -ay is the Latin-Gaul. poss. suff. -ác-um; the first element doubtless embodies a pers. name]

(English) One who came from Chancey or Chancay, in France.

From Canci, near Amiens. The pedigree of this family is clearly and minutely given by Sir Henry Chauncy, in his History of Hertfordshire. Two brothers, William and Auschar de Canci, flourished temp. Henry I. “William, the eldest, purchased the manor of Schripenbec, in Yorkshire, of Odo Balistarius, a great Norman, who held it by grant of William the Conqueror (Domes. Ebor. xxiv.) and this William lived there with Walter his son, who was his successor.” Walter, Lord of Schirpenbec, the first named by Dugdale, gave fifteen pounds fine in 5 Stephen for license to marry whom he pleased. We are not informed as to the lady of his choice; but he left two sons, Anfrid and Simon, who both appear in the Liber Niger as holding five knight’s fees; Anfried in the co. of York, and Simon in Lincolnshire. Anfrid’s younger grandson, or probably, from the length of time, his great grandson, was Lord of Upton in Northamptonshire.

Thomas de Chauncy, the representative of the elder line, had a writ of military summons 25 Ed. I. in which he is styled Baron de Skirkenbek, the manor being held of the King in capite; “but it does not appear that either he, or his descendants had ever afterwards summons to parliament as barons of the realm.” —Banks. He married the heiress of his Lincolnshire kinsman, It is somewhat remarkable that the two branches bore different arms. Those of Chauncy of Yorkshire were Gules, a cross patonce Argent, on a chief Azure a Lion passant, Or: those of Chauncy of Lincolnshire, Argent, a Chevron Gules within a Border Sable, charged with eight bezants. Isabel, sister of the last Gerard de Chauncy, who brought him Wylughton and other lands in Lincoln, and Hoghton in Notts. In the time of Henry VI. the Chauncys migrated into Hertfordshire, where they acquired a considerable property through a Gifford heiress. The historian of the family, Sir Henry Chauncy, knight, sergeant-at-law, eminent as a learned and assiduous antiquary, died in the early part of the last century, and left descendants by two of his three wives. But in the third generation these had completely died out; and the sole survivor in the male line then in England, Nathaniel Chauncy (the grandson of a younger brother who was Vicar of Ware and had gone out to America with the Puritan emigrants in the seventeenth century) ended his days in 1790. His heiress was his second daughter Amelia, the wife of her cousin Charles Snell, who took the name of Chauncy, and transmitted it to two sons. Both the sons, however, left daughters; and the greater part of the inheritance devolved upon one of these, who married Henry Edward Surtees, of Redworth Hall in the co. of Durham.

Charles Chauncy, the Vicar who settled in New England, had been imprisoned in his own country for refusing to rail in his communion table. “Dying in America in 1671, as President of Harvard College, he bequeathed through his children, the following names to the land of his adoption:—Isaac, Ichabod, Sarah, Barnabas, Elnathan, and Nathaniel. The younger Chauncys married and begot children. A grandson of Isaac Chauncey died at Boston, in 1787, aged eighty-three. He was a great patriot, preacher, and philanthropist at a critical time in his country’s history.” The name spread, and became as popular a baptismal name in America, as Sidney is in England. “It was a memorial of Charles Chauncey, of Boston, and has now an average place throughout the eastern border and the older settlements. I take up the New York Directory for 1878, and at once light upon Chauncey Clark, Chauncey Peck, and Chauncey Quintard; while, to distinguish the great Smith family, there are Chauncey Smith, lawyer, Chauncey Smith, milk-dealer, Chauncy Smith, meat-seller, and Chauncy Smith, junior, also engaged in the meat-market. Thus, it is popular with all classes.”—Bardsley's Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature.

A Norman name: Canchy; a local name