The Name

Whence came our name Kirkbride? Your historian was in blanket ignorance of its derivation until the reunion at Lake Park Sept. 2, 1911. There a letter from Mrs. Charles Walton of Woodbury, N.J., was furnished which gave this strange bit of history as authentic. Some time before 1066 A.D., the time of the Norman conquest, a church was built in a parish twelve miles west of Carlyle, Cumberland county, north-west England, and was dedicated to St. Brydock, or St. Bride, one of the earliest missionaries who came from Ireland to convert the inhabitants of the wild regions around Solway Firth. The village about St. Brydock church (called Bride kirk, or kirk Bride), fell to the inheritance of Odard III, Baron of Wigton; and his descendants took their name from the estate and were known as de Kirkbrides. The last of those in direct succession sold the manor in 1540 and during the tumult of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, no entries were made in register, none till 1660.

Whether the blood of Baron Odard flows in our veins or not we do not know, —nor care. But our ancestors came from his estates, and we still bear the name that took root in the old St. Brydock's kirk, a church which was older when Columbus discovered America, than the ships of Columbus would be now.