Hi Denise!
I just added the tag "Heckathorn", one of my gt-gt-gt grandmothers, so here I am, over a year and a half after your question!
My Heckathorn family (which seems to be most, if not all, of them in the US - although the surname spelling varies slightly among them) has some pretty incredible researchers. They have found that the Heckathorns came to Philadelphia from Alsace (a German-speaking region of France, on the German border) in 1751, and from Switzerland before that, traced back to the early 1600s. It's a German surname, and its authentic German form is "Heckendorn". "Hecken" means "bush", and "dorn" means "thorn", and it refers to a specific kind of plant with nice flowers.
See Heckathorn-13, for example.