The name Hickford probably means  high ford , or is a derivative of the name Hug or Hugh, in which case it means  Hugh's ford. My Hickfords came originally from the Essex/Suffolk border, in and around the village of Ovington and the town of Clare. In 1881 the surname is most common in the Essex/Suffolk/Cambridgeshire area.

Hickford was my adopted mother's maiden name. I know very little about the family. My mother Billie (christened Alberta) was an only child, and her father George died well before I was born. His father was an engine driver, and had travelled north to County Durham, where he married and all his children were born. George Hickford, a Royal Military Light Infantry bandsman in the early part of the 20th century, later had a grocer's shop at 169 Stoke Road, Gosport, from at least the mid 1930s until the early 1950s.

The Burtons (Saxon burgh = fort, tun = enclosure) came from west Wiltshire, from the villages of Bowerchalke (home for novelist William Golding and thinker James Lovelock) and Broad Chalke on the River Ebble. Burtons were most frequent in 1881 in the east and Midlands, with an outlying concentration in Wiltshire.