Name Origins
by Julie Helen Otto
AQUILA (m) (Latin ‘eagle’). In Christian
iconography the eagle is a symbol
Of the
Gospel of St. John. A man named Aquila was associated with St. Paul;
A later Aquila (fl. Early half 2nd century
A.D.) translated the Hebrew Bible into
a very
literal Greek. Both men are said to have been natives of Pontus [in Asia
Minor], the latter prob. A native of Sinope in that region (Henry Wace and
William C, Piercy, A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the
End of the Sixth Century A.D., with an Account of the Principal Sects and
Heresies [London: John Murray, 1911, repr. Peabody, Mass,: Henderson
Publishers, 1994], pp. 38-39)
Aquila Chase (1618-1670) was an early settler
of Hampton, N.H. (1640) and Newbury, Massachusetts (1646). John Carroll chase and George Walter
Chamberlain, Seven Generations of the Descendants of Aquila and Thomas Chase
(Derry, N.H. 1928, rev. ed. Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1983, 1993), note that
the exact parentage of the immigrant Aquila Chase and his brother Thomas seem to
be still unknown: although several earlier English Aquila Chases have been
identified in Chesham, Bucks and in London, no positive matches have been found
this rare given name was Aquila Purchase
od Kingweston, Somerset, and Dorchester, Mass., brother-in –law of Bernard
Capen of Dorchester in Old and New England.
Both Chase and Purchase were likely names for Aquila, husband of
Priscilla, mentioned by St. Paul.
The 1790
census lists 21 men named Aquila, with occurrences from Vermont to South
Carolina, with the largest number in Maryland. In 1850, there were 111
men with the
name, and, in 1940, there were 77.
Pictures found tru Google Images & Wikipedia.org
Pictures found tru Google Images & Wikipedia.org
