Robert wrote:

I have been building a family tree for some years now and have traced the family line back to the early 17th century. I have done this partly by asking family members what they remember of their parents and partly through discovering a site on the internet which has all the telephone books of the world. I have then gone through all the French directories for any mention of my surname and writing to enquire whether they have any knowledge they can add. I have had some success with this method and recently discovered a 'third cousin once removed', who supplied a lot of information. In this way, I have been able to create a number of small trees which, I am sure, must join together somewhere in the past. I have also found another Soudain who has done quite a lot of work on his own family and has been able to trace his family back to the early 17th century. It is just possible that the two earliest names we have found were related in some way but it might be difficult to make a connection - his reasoning is that many early church records were destroyed during the French Revolution. He also mentioned, in passing, that the origin of the name might be in the word 'soude' - someone who worked with soda.

Among the people I wrote to was the mayor of Berneuilles, (my grandfather's home village in the Pas de Calais), and he very generously supplied a lot of information and a small tree of the earliest Soudains from details in the town records and for this I am very grateful. I also wrote to a Soudain living in Boulogne-sur-Mer and his daughter became very interested in the family history and supplied a number of copies of death certificates from the Boulogne records.