The surnameEddy is used by descendants of a number of English, Irish and Scottish families.
Etymology
Frank R. Holmes, in his Directory of the Ancestral Heads of New England Families, 1600-1700, proposes two possible origins; the Gaeliceddee, "instructor", or from the Saxoned and ea, "backwards" and "water", a whirlpool or eddy, making the surname Eddy a place-name. Another possible origin is the Saxon root ead, "success" or "prosperity". Ead occurs in numerous commonly used names, as Edgar, Edmund, Edward, Edwin, and the outdated Edwy. John Eddy of Taunton spells the name Eddway in the earliest record so far found. Eddy could also be a diminutive of any one of these names.[1]
Robert Ferguson, in his work on English Surnames, believes that Eddy is a place-name: “Eday, Eady, Eddy are from ead, prosperity. Hence the name of the rock Eddiston, on which the celebrated light house is built. From this word are compounded a great number of Anglo-Saxon names of which we have Edward, Edmund, Edgar, Edw Edwin.”[2]
Early history
One of the first mentions that is close to the form of Eddy, is the name of the priest Eddi or Edde, Latinized into Eddius. He went to Northumbria from Canterbury with Bishop Wilfrid (or Wilfrith) in 669, and later took the name Stephanus. He taught the Roman method of chanting, and in 709 he was in the monastery of Ripon, where he wrote a life of Wilfrid in Latin.
In the Domesday Book, the name Eddeu is used in a description of Little Abington, Cambridgeshire, and during the time of Edward the First there were a number of people named Ede, Edde, and Edwy on the tax collection rolls of Worcestershire. There is a record in Hertfordshire, of a William Edy, Gentleman, in 1486. Edie, Eddy, Eddye, Edshune and Edye are found in numerous records in Gloucestershire from 1545 onward. At Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eyde is found as a surname between 1599 and 1610.
Starting from 1570 in the records of many parishes of the Archdeaconry Court of Cornwall, the following surnames are found: Edy, Eady, Eedy, Ede, Edye, Eddey, and Eddy. In Bristol, the town where William Eddye, the Vicar, was born, a number of wills from the late 16th century have the surname of Eddie, Eddye or Eddy. Ade, Adie, Addy, Eadie are common Scottish surnames. These may be forms of the name “Adam”. David Eadie of Moneaght, Scotland, was granted a coat of arms in 1672.
The surname in North America
In North America, the largest family group who bears the Eddy surname are descended from two brothers, John and Samuel, who immigrated to America on October 29, 1630, on a ship called Handmaid. Their father, William Eddye, was the Vicar of the church in Cranbrook, England, from 1586 to 1616 and was born in Bristol in the mid-16th century. Other Northern American "patriarchs" are John Eddy who lived in Taunton, Massachusetts in the late 17th century; John Eddy of Woodbridge, New Jersey, (Scottish) who immigrated in the early 18th century; James Eddy, born in Dublin, Ireland, around 1712, and immigrated in 1753; Thomas Eddy, immigrated in the late 18th century to Fort Ann, New York, from Ireland; brothers William and John Eddy, immigrated from Ireland to New York city in the mid 19th century; and William Dave Eddy, who came to the United States from Cornwall, England, in 1887. There is a currently large family of Eddys in Cornwall.
William A. Eddy (1896–1962), American academic and intelligence officer
William Abner Eddy (1850–1909), American accountant and journalist famous for his experiments with kites
William C. Eddy (1902–1989), American naval officer, submariner, engineer, television producer, educator, cartoonist, artist, inventor, entrepreneur, explorer, writer
William F. Eddy (1852–1930), Canadian political figure from Saskatchewan
Eddy, Ruth Story Devereux, ed. (1930). The Eddy Family in America: A Genealogy. Compiled by Ruth Story Devereux Eddy, A.B., A.M. and Published Under the Direction of the Eddy Family Association, in Commemoration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Landing of John and Samuel Eddy at Plymouth, October 29, 1630. Boston, Massachusetts: T. O. Metcalf Company. hdl:2027/wu.89062883178. OCLC608715552.
Breck, Ruth Allendorf, ed. (1968). The Eddy Family in America. Supplement of 1968. Boston, Massachusetts: The Eddy Family Association, Inc. hdl:2027/wu.89080567647. OCLC866773227.
This page lists people with the surnameEddy. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.
