This Blog is for the most part the story of the family history of our own branch of the Eldridge family. The investigation of the ancestors of Hetty Jane Owen, the wife of Charles Albert Eldridge is now complete, and the tale has resumed with an examination of the line of Charles Albert Eldridge.
As for our own branch of the Eldridge family, they had remained relatively sedentary in Southern England, as far as one can tell.
The first definitive sighting of these Eldridges is in Mortlake, Surrey. The Mortlake marriage records for James Eldridge and William Eldridge suggest that they were both born in the late 1750s or early 1760s. It is reasonable to assume therefore that James and William were closely related, and most likely brothers.
The Mortlake records do not however provide any clues as to where they were actually born, or where they originally came from.
William Eldridge was the X2 great-grandfather of Charles Albert Eldridge, and it is with him that the Eldridge line of Charles Albert begins.
Plenty of other Eldridges pop up in the New World records. David Eldridge drowned in 1797 when swimming his horse across the Grand River in Cleveland, Ohio, and acquired the doubtful honour of becoming the first person of European descent to die in the newly founded city.
Meanwhile George H. Eldridge (1844 -1918) meanwhile was given the Medal of Honor for his part in fighting off the Kiowa Indians led by Chief Kicking Bird at the Battle of the Little Wichita River in July 1870.
Back in England, a Sarah Eldridge was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in London in 1793. Her sentence was later commuted to transportation and she landed in New South Wales in 1796, the first of many Australian Eldridge immigrants. Other Eldridges made their way to New Zealand, to South Africa and Canada.
The famous marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe in Virginia in 1614 led through the generations to the marriage of their great-great granddaughter, Martha Bolling, to a Thomas Eldridge in 1727. This branch of the family commemorated their famous ancestors for generations onwards, leading in more than one case to the christening of a Pocahontas Eldridge. The original Pocahontas of Virginia was brought to England by her husband, and died, in, of all places, Gravesend, Kent, having been presented in the interim to London society as an exemplar of the 'civilized savage', a product of the humanising touch of English values.
Thomas Eldridge’s father, also named Thomas, was born in 1685, in the Henrico colony in Virginia, so the Eldridges were reasonably well represented in the settlement of the New World.
Much later in history, Lieutenant Commander John Eldridge Jr. (1903 –1942), a descendant of Pocahontas through this very line, was commemorated posthumously for his role in the US attack on the Solomon Islands not only with the award of a Navy Cross but by having a destroyer escort named after him, the USS. Eldridge.
Other Eldreds and Eldridges made their way permanently to the New World. There are towns named Eldridge in both Iowa and Alabama to attest to this, and numerous Eldridge lines across the USA.
In New York, there is an Eldridge street just near Chinatown and named in 1817 after Lt. Joseph C. Eldridge, whose unit was ambushed in Canada by Indian allies of the British in the 1812 war.
As time went by, there were certain Eldreds and Eldridges, who rose to the surface and made names for themselves. There was, for example, Thomas Eldred the Mariner, who accompanied Sir Thomas Cavendish on the third circumnavigation of the globe. They set off from Plymouth in 1586 and returned in 1588. Until 2012, there was still a pub that bore his name in Ipswich.
As the centuries rolled by, the early Eldridges, of whom we know next to nothing, observed quietly, as in an early theocratic version of a European Union, agreements and alliances were struck and led to some striking initiatives, including the Crusades, set up specifically to liberate the Middle East from its own inhabitants in the name of God. These crusaders had their moments, but by the time the great medieval orders disbanded, Jerusalem and its surrounding lands were still firmly in the hands of the Arab Muslims, who had stubbornly resisted the claims of the Western Europeans to their lands. In between, the ever-zealous Crusaders initiated pogroms against the Jews of central Europe, and succeeded eventually in so debilitating their supposed ally, the Byzantine Empire that the Ottoman Turks were able to transit seamlessly through Anatolia and eventually capture Constantinople in 1453.
All in all, this early experiment in European unity did not work out particularly well, and was marked from the outset by disputes between its leaders, each of whom had their own national and territorial ambitions, which tended to take priority over what were supposed to be the actual aims of the exercise. Also using pan-European religious objectives as their pretext, the Knights Templars meanwhile succeeded in laying down a business model that bears a striking resemblance to today’s multinational corporations and international banking operations, often richer and more powerful than the nation states in which they operate and dangerously unaccountable for their actions. The powers of the day observed this with alarm and resorted to a religious pretext to destroy the Templars, and sequester their wealth. Highly imaginative and richly embroidered accusations of heresy, accompanied by a myriad of creatively manufactured instruments of torture, exquisite in their inventiveness, extracted the necessary confessions. And that was the end of the Templars.
Eventually, it was just so much easier if one really keenly wished to kill or be killed for a cause to cut out the travelling and indulge the habit nearer to home. The European powers turned on each other, disremembered their common origins and belief systems and and invested their energies instead in territorial warfare, and the development of nationalist rhetorics to accompany it. And in the process, the descendants of Eldred the Terrible transformed themselves into an archetypal English family, rooted in the Home Counties, and once Henry VIII had effectively nationalised the Church, making their way in the world as Anglicans, loyal to the monarch of the day and to the Church of England.
The new policies of the Normans included an innovation that remains with us today. They required all citizens to take surnames. Thus, the Aelfrics and Alrics and Edreds of the old days became the Eldreds and Aldridges and subsequently Eldridges of the new era, and started to work their way up in the world once more in an England where French was now the language of government and Latin the language of the church, and old English a second-class Germanic vernacular of the old Anglo-Saxon families.
Out of this distillation, the modern English language was eventually to emerge. Furthermore, as we all know, cultural and religious change over the centuries had long since led to the displacement of old Brittonic and Germanic and Scandinavian belief systems, and the adoption of an entirely new but alien theology imported from the Middle East. The bond that was now to bridge prevailing divides, and instil social unity was Christianity, and, specifically, obeisance to Rome, and to the Pope.
All in all, The Anglo-Saxons ambled along rather satisfactorily, if somewhat violently, mostly either enduring, repelling, or buying off successive waves of other prospective migrants from across the North Sea, such as the Vikings. In 1066 however, all that was to change, when the Norman French, themselves Viking descendants, crossed the English Channel and defeated the last Anglo-Saxon King, the ill-fated Harold, at the Battle of Hastings. And given the demographics available to us about the Eldridges of Sussex, it is quite possible that there may have been Eldred's fighting for Harold as he made his tragic last stand.
From now on these Eldreds were to be second class citizens, subjects to a French speaking aristocracy with a dual penchant for ruthless conquest and a murderously efficient bureaucracy, as exemplified by the Domesday Book.
The new policies of the Normans included an innovation however that remains with us today. They required all citizens to take surnames. Thus, the Aelfrics and Alrics and Edreds of the old days became the Eldreds and Aldridges and subsequently Eldridges of the new era, and started to work their way up in the world once more in an England where French was now the language of government and Latin the language of the church, and old English a second-class Germanic vernacular of the old Anglo-Saxon families. Out of this distillation, the modern English language was eventually to emerge. Furthermore, as we all know, cultural and religious change over the centuries had long since led to the displacement of old Brittonic and Germanic and Scandinavian belief systems, and the adoption of an entirely new but alien theology imported from the Middle East. The bond that was now to bridge prevailing divides, and instil social unity was Christianity, and, specifically, obeisance to Rome, and to the Pope.
Ethelred, or Æthelred reigned between 978 and 1013, and again from 1014-1016. He died in London and was buried in Old St. Paul’s Cathedral. Like Edred, he owed his ascent to the throne to an assassination, in this case of his elder half-brother, Edward the Martyr. His nickname was actually a pun on his name and did not mean ‘unready’ but rather ‘ill-advised’, suggesting the meaning of his name was rather ‘wise advisor’, not so far removed from the Eldridge meaning of ‘noble ruler’ that has been suggested. Ethelred spent most of his own reign in conflict with the Danes, and despite a brief interregnum when he fled to Normandy, he was King for 37 years, and was the longest ruling Anglo-Saxon King. He was the father of Edward the Confessor. When he died, Cnut was on the verge of conquering most of England. Ethelred’s tomb was lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Other variations on the Eldridge name include Aldred and Eldred, and, indeed two Anglo-Saxon Kings have been identified as having related names, specifically Kings Edred, and Ethelred the Unready.
King Eadred, or Edred was King from 946 until his death in 955. He was a grandson of Alfred the Great. His most notable success was bringing the Kingdom of Northumbria under English control. He succeeded his elder brother, Edmond I, who had been stabbed to death in Gloucestershire. He died in Frome in Somerset, and was buried in Winchester.
