Among British surnames, there are two families whose surnames spread in early times far beyond the location which gave rise to them. One of them is Pickering, which was already found in most parts of England by about 1400. This seems surprising when one considers the size of the town of Pickering, but if a junior line of a prominent local family took the name “de Pickering”, if it found favour with another prominent family or if it made judicial marriages, it can be assumed that feudal lordship accounted for the dispersal of the name. By the 16th century Gilbert Pickering was an important landowner in Northamptonshire, Robert Pickering had already bought up his exiled lord’s holdings in Barlby, Sir William Pickering of Oswaldkirk was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir John Puckering of Flamborough was, if not a favourite, her very efficient Keeper of the Great Seal.

The families that took the names Pickering and later Puckering are for the most part unrelated. Leaving aside the two lines that had their origin in the Middle East, the most recent common male ancestor of the European lines carried the Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup R1 or R-M173 and lived in about 20,000 BC in Asia. As this man was the progenitor of unknown millions, his living offspring are too numerous to be considered related.

A subgroup of R-M173 had branched off by around 15,000 BC and formed the lines that would eventually emigrate to the Thirteen Colonies in the first half of the 1600s and become the Pickerings of Portsmouth, NH, the Pickerills of Northumberland County, VA, and most likely the Pickerings of Salem, MA. They were closely related and probably stemmed from the Pickerings of Northamptonshire, who are traditionally considered a sub-branch of the Pickerings of Killington, though Y-DNA testing does not bear this out.

It is looking increasingly likely that Pickerings of Killington belonged to separate cluster whose most recent common ancestor carried the R-L151 subclade which branched off after c3000 BC. Their first identifiable member belonged to the Anglo-Norman de Brus family that held land in Pickering in the 1100s. He took the name “de Pickering” when he moved to Westmorland in about 1250 to manage part of the vast holdings that had been granted to the de Bruses by William the Conqueror. The family had a policy of appointing junior members to support it as tenants, clerics or administrators in order to preserve the unity and power of the lordship. For this reason Pickerings can be found elsewhere where the de Bruses had holdings, and also on the lands of another prominent family, the Greystokes, with whom they were connected through marriage. The Pickerings of Killington gave rise to the Pickerings of County Durham (Pickerings of Brancepeth 1, Pickerings of Brancepeth 2 and Pickerings of Auckland St. Andrew) and probably also to the Puckerings (Puckerings of Flamborough and offshoots). The latter rose to prominence in the 16th century, at about the time they adopted the alternative spelling of the name, and were often found in the areas of Yorkshire where the Greystokes had holdings.

The Pickerings of the North York Moors (Pickerings of Hackness 1 and Pickerings of Hackness 2), the Pickerings of Cumberland and the Pickerings of Oswaldkirk went their separate ways after c2800 BC, the Oswaldkirk Pickerings sharing DNA with the Allens until 150 BC when they branched off into two separate lines. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Pickerings of Barlby are an offshoot of the Oswaldkirk family, one of their number establishing a line in Worcestershire in the late 17th century.

Though Pickerings had already established themselves in the West Riding and Lancashire, the name undoubtedly became more widespread as a result of the industrial revolution, and it was the opening up of North America, the Antipodes and South Africa that took it beyond the shores of Britain. Added to this is the incontestable fact that the Pickerings were prolific and my own observations suggest that many of those who survived childhood lived long lives.

Sources:
A History of British Surnames, Richard Mckinley: https://books.google.fr/books?id=RyuPAwAAQBAJ&pg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Y-chromosome_DNA_haplogroup
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R-L151
The Brus Family in England and Scotland, 1100-c1290, Dr. Ruth Margaret Blakely: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1594