The Pickering families on the following pages are named and dated after the first known member and are shown in their complete form, unless the sheer number of family members renders comprehension impossible, in which case a separate page has been created for the larger branches. Each family group is posted in the dominant colour of its respective coat(s) of arms: the Pickerings of Killington are shown in blue, the Pickerings of Oswaldkirk in red and the Puckerings of Flamborough in black. Those branches whose family group is not yet known have been assigned a random colour.
All the families have been built on data derived from as wide a range as possible of documentary evidence. Some connections are inevitably based on circumstantial evidence, educated guesses and common sense, and where there is room for doubt the name appears in black.
For the sake of consistency, the birth / baptism, marriage and death / burial dates are all shown according to the Gregorian calendar. The latter was adopted in the Catholic countries of Europe in either 1582 or within the following decade. However, the Protestant countries, rebelling against any directive emanating from Rome, maintained the Julian calendar, which is slightly shorter, until they eventually realised the wisdom of the reform, with Great Britain and its possessions finally adopting the Gregorian calendar in 1752. All events on the following pages that took place before 25 March in a given year up to and including 1752 are therefore counted in the following year.