Family name origins & meanings
- Southern English : habitational name from some minor place so called, probably from Old English rēad ‘red’ + wudu ‘wood’. The reference is probably to birch trees as they appear in the spring.
- Abraham Redwood, a former English merchant ship captain, who had become owner through marriage of a valuable sugar plantation in Antigua and a large number of slaves, moved to America in 1712 when his son Abraham (1709–88) was three years old. Thirty years later, the son was one of the group of merchant princes whose prosperity and education was focused in Newport, RI. Intellectuals and people of culture flocked there, due in part to the Redwood Library, established in 1747 with a generous gift from Abraham the younger, who had three sons and a daughter who reached maturity.