Huckaby - U198

Last updated September 3, 2023.

Huckaby/Huckabee/Huckabay vel sim represent another old pairing of a surname and a specific sub-branch of BY729. They are characterized by yDNA of Hg FT245646 whose TMRCA is estimated about 1550 which seems to fit reasonably with the paper trails available. All presently tested members of the branch live in the US, but their ancestors undoubtedly originated in England. Their closest relatives within the BY729 tree belong to the Browne II family group whos shared ancestor with the Huckabys is projected by the yDNA to about 1200AD.

Exactly when, how and from where in England they crossed to America is not attested by any historical documents and so far only provisional conclusions can be offered. US Huckaby pedigrees as available to me are often confused and clearly full of unreliable information / wild guesses at their oldest parts. They were certainly present in Virginia in the last quarter of the 17th Century but I cannot tell how many there were and what was their mutual relationship. A number of online sources claim their descent from Huccaby, a hamlet on Dartmoor in Devon, however this cannot be accepted. There is no record of anybody named Huckaby in this area in the 17th, 18th or even 19th centuries. A family name Hockaday is well attested in Devon by records, however its form is stable and there is no reason to posit it somehow gave rise to Huckaby, by way of corruption or other. The occasional spelling Hoccaby or the like in the American sources does not in itself prove a connection to the Devon place of similar form.

Also quite often the secondary genealogical sources provide various villages in Lincolnshire, England as the place of birth for some of the 17th Century Huckaby US ancestors. These again are but guesses presented as facts. I’ve not found any attestation of the name in Lincolnshire for that century, it only starts to appear there from roughly 1700. However, the name Huckerby (in various spelling forms) is quite widespread in Lincolnshire in that century and it’s been clearly equated with Huckaby by some researchers. This is a major source of confusion in the early US pedigrees since often the individuals are presented as attested by primary sources yet without mentioning that Huckaby was substituted for Huckerby. The same goes for the assumed Devon Huccaby origins where Huckaby is leisurely substituted for the actual Hockaday of the primary sources in the pedigrees.

Huckaby is a fairly rare surname in England and ever was judging by its meagre presence in the records. There is only one area in Britain where we come across the surname (in forms like Huckaby, Hackaby, Huckebey) before the last quarter of the 17th Century – central Essex between Chelmsford and Braintree (especially villages of White Notley, Terling and Fairstead). The oldest attestations of the surname here reach to about 1600 (William Huckabye, butcher in Braintree, 1589 ). Essex, then, is presently the best candidate for the place of origin from where Huckaby surname crossed to America and also spread to Lincolnshire and Leicestershire where it starts to pop up from about 1700. Since central Essex records show at least two Huckabys who must had been born about 1600, the TMRCA of about 1550AD for the surname suggested by genetics would seem to be rather well aligned with the observed facts.

The major problem with this conclusion arises from the fact that Huckaby is a typical habitational name, i.e. family name derived from the name of a place. By element originating in Old Norse býr “farmstead” represents a rather widespread legacy of Viking settlement in England. However, there is no ~Huckaby village in Essex and, as a matter of fact, in all of England with the sole exception of Huccaby in Devon which, as we already know, has to be excluded as the source of the surname. However, it might be objected that the surname could form long before 1550 and move to Essex while all trace of it was lost in Devon. This possibility is contradicted by the fact that what is known as Huccaby today was originally Woghebye. It only attained forms like Hoockaby and Hookeby in the later part of the 16th Century when not a single person named Huckaby is to be found in Devon.

The only solution respecting both linguistic and geographic facts would regard Huckaby as a corruption of an assumed original Hucka/erby, a place name turned surname . While Huckerby surname is extant, regrettably we know of no yDNA tested man of this surname to prove or disprove this option on genetic grounds. Geographical aspect of the hypothesis also presents some issues. There are two possible sources of the name, either Huckerby in Lincolnshire or Uckerby in Yorkshire¹. The latter village is to be found not far southwest of Middlesbrough, rather long distance from Essex. The former, situated between Gainsborough and Kirton-in-Lindsey, is basically uninhabited today and with no written records from the time of its existence as a hamlet in the Medieval period . Its distance from Essex, while notably shorter, is still quite substantial. The distance in itself doesn’t disprove the hypothesis, however it would suggest a more complex history of the surname before 1550AD.

Interestingly, Essex sources record Huckerby / Huckerbie surname in Chelmsford, Braintree and Bocking, i.e. in the vicinity of the places where Huckabys are first attested, from at least 1578. Even more importantly, they perhaps let us glean traces of the very process in which Huckerby transformed into Huckaby. In 1617 Erasmas Huckerby and his wife Mary of Braintree together with Richard Webb petitioned local authorities concerning troubles caused to them by certain John Cooper . Some 30 years later we meet Erasmus Huckaby at an assize court at Chelmsford and Erasmus Huckerby, butcher of Rayne (near Braintree) in a court session . Rather rare given name of Erasmus makes it virtually certain that the three are either the same man or a father and a son. Similarly, Sigismund Huckerby witnessed at court in 1668 . The same case, or continuation of the same crime, was brought to court again two years later, the name of the witness being this time recorded as Sigismund Huckaby . In 1674 Sigismond Huckabee was a defendant in family quarrel over a property in Braintree . Sigismond Huckeby, a butcher of Braintree, charged his apprentice with running away in 1677 while Sigismund Huckerby appears in session rolls in 1687 . Again, Sigismond is unique enough to make sure that despite the Huckeby/Huckaby/Huckabee/Huckerby variations the man in question is in all cases the same one. This is about as far as we can get without yDNA testing to show that Huckaby surname appeared in the late 16th/17th century central Essex as a derivation of Huckerby. Whether its ultimate origins lay in Huckerby hamlet of Lincolnshire or Uckerby far to the north in Yorkshire we cannot tell at the moment.

Reading the records we can see Huckabys in the 17th century Essex were butchers, curriers (speacialists in dressing, finishing and colouring tanned hides), farmers and yeomen.

Clearly there were some NPEs (non-paternal events) which spread Huckaby DNA to other surnames since men named Birge, Sprouse and Chafin have also been found to carry R1b-FT245646. However, that Huckabys were its original bearers is amply attested by the fact that they represent majority of the testees within this haplogroup. Details have not yet been worked out but it would appear that the respective NPEs occurred only after immigration to North America, some of them may even be fairly recent.

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To make matters even more complicated, one of the places with rather early (end of the 17th century) presence of both Huckaby and Huckerby is village called Haceby in Lincolnshire. The name is surprisingly close to Huckaby, however it is pronounced with “-s-” (“Hazebi” in Domesday Book) and thus cannot be the source of the surname (and even less so for Huckerby).