Origin of Name

Trying to find the origin of the Edenborough surname has proven far more difficult than I expected.

Lower’s Patronymica Britannica, The Oxford Dictionary of British Surnames and Black’s The Surnames of Scotland all suggest it as being a variation of Edinburgh, the Scottish metropolis.

Apart from three christenings of Edenburghs in the 1690s and the marriage of an Edingburgh in1809, I am yet to find any further appearances of the surname to support the Scottish theory.

Henry Harrison in The Surnames of the United Kingdom suggests a connection to the King of Northumbria, Eadwine.

And Charles Wareing Bardsley writes in English Surnames “that the manorial residence is still in many parts of England, with the country folk, the ‘bury’. To this or ‘borough’ we owe our Burys, Boroughs, Borrows, Buroughs, Broughs, Burghs” – all variations I have found in my Edenborough research.

The surname is quite obviously locative and, with the help of some very knowledgeable fellow GOONS (in particular, Andrew Millard), Attenborough, Nottinghamshire, could be a strong contender for the place of origin.

In recent correspondence to me, Andrew pointed out that findings of the EPNS show Attenborough as having been variously Addenbroug’ (1305), Adenburgh (1401), Adynburgh (1439), Addenborough (1496), Adenberow/Adenborrow (1535), Adenborowe (1570) and the spelling of Attenborough with “tt” rather than “d” or “dd” only appears from 1617. Furthermore, Andrew wrote “make the minor vowel change from A to E and you have Edenborough and its variants”.

My studies into the surname have already shown a strong localisation to this area, so thanks to Andrew, I’ll now start looking into the Nottinghamshire contender as place of origin as well as widening my research of Edenborough to include variants of Addenborough and will post my finds as they arise.