Research on the Shappee name has been undertaken for over thirty years. Most of the research has focused on finding the ancestry and descendants of Ashkenaz Shappee, who was born in 1749 in Lorraine, France. Ashkenaz served in the Revolutionary War and settled in Chemung County, New York, where he died in 1797. Along the way, other groups of Shappees have been discovered in different areas of the United States, and also in Canada and England. It is known in some cases that the surname was Anglicized from original French spellings.