Eldridge DNA

Michael Maglio in his genetic research into Eldridge origins, including, the variants Eldredge, Eldred, Aldred, Aldridge, Aldrich, also marks the name down as Anglo-Saxon in origin. According to his research:

…the name has three distinct possible sources, the first and most likely being a derivative of the Middle English personal name "Aldred", which represents a coalescence of two Olde English pre 7th Century personal names: "Ealdroed", composed of the elements "eald" meaning "old", plus "roed", counsel. The second possibility is that the name is topographical, from "residence by an alder grove". The derivation, in this case, is from the Middle English "al(d)rett", from the Olde English "alor", an alder tree.1 Several tribes were known to exist on the neck of the Cimbric peninsula in northwestern Europe. They were known as Saxons, and one among them was the ancestral Eldred. These Saxons invaded England and drove out the native Britons. The Saxon word for the noun “terrible” was “eldred”.

He has located the following Eldridge markers across the North Sea:

In short, the early Eldridges, if the names are anything to go by, were members of marauding Anglo-Saxon and Jutish tribes, who made their way down from Scandinavia to North Germany and then moved on again, in search of a better life, in the lands of the ancient Britons. Maglio notes the heavy preponderance of the name in Norfolk, Suffolk (East Anglia) and Essex and Sussex, confirming, to cut a long story short, that most Eldridges in Great Britain today and indeed elsewhere were originally migrants from around the Cimbric peninsula.

None of this should be of any particular surprise. For all its French accretions, and Latinate vocabulary, English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the German language family, and the linguistic character of England is synchronous in this respect with DNA profiling which shows how minimally the genetic profile of English people was altered by either Roman or Norman intrusions. 

This common identification of the Eldridges with East Anglia does not match up particularly well with later census data however, which locates the heaviest density of Eldridges in Sussex, particularly around Battle. From there it would have been just a short migration into the villages of Kent, just to the north-east.