Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan One-Name Study Blog and Resources Website
Welcome to the blog and resources website for the Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan one-name study.
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The Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan One-Name Study (ONS) is for everyone with any of the surnames Becket, Beckett, Bicket, Bickett, Bichan, or variants thereof. It is also for people with other surnames who are descended via the male line from people with the cited surnames.
There is a companion website which focuses on the Ayrshire Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan tree, at https://bicket.one-name.net.
The spelling Beckett is today the predominant spelling world-wide out of all of the possible variants. Even within the Scottish Ayrshire tree, Beckett is one of the two most common spellings, the other being Bickett. This has not always been so, but is the result of the ‘migration’ of spellings over time to the two ‘t’ versions, and to the ‘e’ versions, from earlier versions. We cannot say why, but just observe that it has happened, and speculate on the causes. The earlier versions in most cases had only one ‘t’. Perhaps some people considered the two ‘t’ versions more ‘sophisticated’. The ‘e’ version was also the better known, so this was probably a factor in some changes, especially when people migrated to new lands.
The ONS has evolved from humbler beginnings and a narrower focus, which explains much of what currently exists. It started out in the 1970s with a focus on the surnames Bicket and Bickett from Ayrshire, Scotland. It was only in 2018 when the project started Y-DNA testing that the scope quickly expanded. The first major expansion was caused by the finding that there were many branches using the surnames Becket and Beckett which were genetically part of the Ayrshire tree. Once those surname spellings were included in the ONS, there was an even greater expansion of scope to include a huge number of lineages which are probably not related to the Ayrshire tree.
Feel free to explore the entire site. You may find the following particularly interesting:
- Origin of the English Beckett Surname Version of 2025 01 04
- Origin of the Bichan Surname Draft of 2025 01 31
- JOONS article on Orkney Bichans
- Branch Classifications Version of 2024 12 16
- Our new blog
- The results of the major BECKET(T)/BICKET(T)/BICHAN Scotland OPR Downloads Project
- The major BECKET(T)/BICKET(T) Branches project
- Slideshows of the reunion. (18 December 2023)
- The presentations from the August 2023 reunion – both general and branch-specific.
- Recordings of how Scots pronounce Bicket(t), Becket(t) and Bichan. Can you tell the difference? Is there any wonder that our surname was spelled so many different ways?
We welcome questions, comments, and anything you have which may enhance the site. There is a contact form at https://bicket.one-name.net/