The Bichan Surname Origin Document has been updated. You can access the updated copy at Origin of the Bichan Surname Draft of 2025 02 06.
This is also a test posting using notification type 1. Please let me know if you have any problems receiving it, e.g., if it goes into your spam folder.
David Bicket
I have been on a multi-year journey to verify with paper evidence, as required by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), that Scotland is the birth country of my patriot ancestor William Thomas Bickett. The birth country was erroneously entered, without proper evidence, as Ireland. He married an Irish woman, Jane Hart. In the American Revolutionary War records, his name is listed as Beckett. In a 2023 trip to Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland, I discovered a good amount of evidence reflecting that in fact, William was born in Ayrshire. This evidence is corroborated by the baptismal records found in the Scotlands People website archives. However, the name and dates corresponding to William Thomas Bickett in the Scotlands People records are correlated to the Bichet family name. There is no hard, written proof that the Bichet name is related to either the Bicket or Bickett names from modern times. In Marion County, Kentucky, William Thomas Bickett’s three sons’ last names engraved on their markers are Bicket, not Bickett. The search for any documentation, a family Bible (preferred by the DAR) is inconclusive. This particular challenge is common as the records span over periods of time when exact written evidence is challenging to achieve, if not altogether impossible. The search continues.
This is a final blog post test prior to migrating email distribution lists to the blog distribution list. Could those people who were on the 11 January Zoom call please try to post a short blog to make sure that it works easily? Go to the blog page, and the first blog gives a link to where you can do your blog. Perhaps just explain one of your brick walls in your Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan research. If it is too complicated, please let me know how it can be improved.
My blog post is about work I have been doing on the Bichan branch of the Ayrshire Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan tree. I wrote a short article about it for the Journal of One-Name Studies, and you can read it here. I’ve also written a draft paper on the origin of the Bichan surname, which you can read here.
We will have a Zoom call of anyone interested in the Becket(t)/Bicket(t)/Bichan one-name study on Saturday 11 January 2025 at 22:00 UK time. One topic to be covered will be the recent breakthroughs on the English Beckett tree. If you wish to join, let us know at bicket (at) one-name.org.
We have had some major breakthroughs with the English Beckett tree. We have been particularly lucky to learn that there were two existing Beckett Big Y DNA testers who were part of a different project. Their earliest common ancestor is estimated by Family Tree DNA to have been born around 1050, effectively confirming the Norman origin theory for the English Beckett surname. For the details, see the status report at Origin of the English Beckett Surname Version of 2024 12 16.
Jim Beckett (J branch) has updated his list of videos about Family Search and WikiTree. It is downloadable from the ‘Other Resources’ page of this website (https://bicket.one-name.blog/wp/other-resources-2).
Thank you, Jim!
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