If you would like a deeper dive and analysis of the project then please read the excellent article,
by Aaron D Bicknell – Available here.
Back at the first Zoom call with the Bicknell Association last summer, one of the questions that came up
was how the various groups of Bicknell’s were related. While we have trees for the Northern US branch
descending from Zachary and the Southern US branch descending from William, we had no idea how
these two branches lined up. Nor did we know how either of these groups would connect to the
Somerset or Warwickshire Bicknell’s. Although some prior work had been done by Sidney Algernon
Bicknell in his Excerpta Biconyllae and Five Pedigrees, finding the origin of the Bicknell family and
identifying various groups of Bicknell’s within England, it is quite difficult to piece together a tree for the
various groups from the records available in England. So, the decision was made to start a Y-DNA
project to determine how the various branches are connected.
While Y-DNA can’t tell us the individual names of our common ancestor for each line, it can estimate
how long ago he lived. Y-DNA testing also has the benefit of being able to span long periods of time.
Autosomal DNA is quite useful for determining close cousins, but it really can’t accurately determine
connections beyond 4th cousins or so. In order to connect the US lines to the English lines, we would
need to have a tool that could accurately determine relationships of greater than 10 generations.
Twenty people from the US, UK, Jamaica & New Zealand were tested for Y-DNA and joined the Bicknell
DNA project. Once the results were received back from Family Tree DNA and compared against each
other, we found out there are a lot more Bicknell families than we expected. Based on the results, it
appears that rather than all Bicknell’s being descended from a single individual who took the name
Bicknell, there were multiple people who each took the same surname independently. The twenty
different participants could be divided into ten separate branches.
Some of the participants were unexpectedly related.
The Bicknell’s in Jamaica are descended from the Taunton Bicknell’s.
It was also verified that Dabney Becknell is descended from William Bicknell who is the founder of the Southern US branch.
On the other hand, some Bicknell’s that were expected to be related were not. NPE’s (non-paternity event) were found in some branches, suggesting that adoption or some other cause had resulted in yet another new line of Y-DNA to adopt the surname.
It turns out that you have to go back a long way to see how the Northern US and Southern US branches
are connected, all the way back to when the Celts first started moving into the British Isles four
thousand years ago. The Taunton branch connects to the US branches at about the same time.
However, most of the other branches don’t connect to these branches for the last forty-seven thousand
years. Since last names became popular in England around 1100AD, each of these branches had to have
their own ancestor who adopted the name Bicknell.
We are looking forward to identifying even more unique branches of the Bicknell family as more
participants join the project.