| Name: | Nicholas Aldridge (or Alldredge) |
| Born: | before 1660 probably England |
| Died: | about 21 November 1708 (buried 21 Nov) |
| Buried: | All Hallows' Chapel Churchyard, Anne Arundel County, Maryland (grave now unmarked) |
| Married: | Martha (possibly Besson) before 1680, probably in Anne Arundel County, Maryland |
| Children: | Thomas Aldridge, William Alldredge (b. 1703) |
Overview
Nicholas Aldridge is the immigrant ancestor of our Aldridge family. He entered a land grant in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, of 300 acres on the south side of the Magothy River, surveyed for him on 20 August 1680. The grant was issued by Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore on 11 July 1681, a tract called "Aldridge's Beginning."[1] Like the other elements in my Aldridge-Alldredge tree, Nicholas Aldridge is the subject of a lot of extravagant and poorly supported claims. On this page, I will document what we know for certain, and do my best to distinguish fact from speculation.
Name
There is evidence from records that Nicholas's son William and at least two branches of his descendants (William b. 1729 and Nathan) spelled their surname Alldredge. Of Nicholas's other descendants, his oldest son Thomas's family appears to have kept the spelling Aldridge. Traditionally, Nicholas Aldridge's name was been spelled Aldridge by Memory Aldridge Lester and other researchers. For now, I will stand by this tradition.
Ancestry and birth
It is widely asserted online that Nicholas Aldridge was christened 28 December 1653 in Wellow Parish, Hampshire, England, the son of Nicholas Aldridge. I have seen no documentation to convince me this is correct. There are many Nicholas Aldridges appearing in online birth registers in this time period; on what evidence do we presume this is the right one?
We can assume that our Nicholas was born before about 1659–60, since he was able to receive a proprietary land grant in 1680. We know he was in Maryland by 1678, so perhaps that pushes the probable birthdate back to before about 1656–57. Within the parameters of a Nicholas Aldridge born in England between 1637 and 1657, only one Nicholas Aldridge appears in a search of the birth registers available on FamilySearch, the one asserted above, christened 28 December 1653 in Hampshire. A second appears if I push the search back to 1627, christened 15 December 1633 at St. Margaret's, Westminster, Middlesex, the son of Thomas Aldridge. But how do we know these records are complete? How do we know Nicholas was born in England and not in Scotland, Wales, or anywhere else? We do not. Unless there is some record connecting Nicholas Aldridge in Maryland back to a specific location in England or wherever, I will not make an assumption.
- ↑ Memory Aldridge Lester, Alldredge-Aldridge-Bracken-Nesmith Families and Their Kin (Chapel Hill, N.C.: privately printed, 1957), available on Ancestry, Internet Archive, and FamilySearch, 5 (Ancestry, Internet Archive, [www.familysearch.org/library/books/idviewer/541095/16 FamilySearch]); Franklin Rudolph Aldridge, Aldridge Records, vol. 2 (Nashville: self-published, 1975), 22 (Ancestry, [hwww.familysearch.org/library/books/idviewer/34303/26 FamilySearch]); Maryland Historical Magazine, vol. 26 (1931), page 273 (Internet Archive).