Ancestors

Sergt. Aquila Chase

Aquila Chase, called Sergeant to tell him from his father, was born at Newbury on 26 September 1652 and died there on 29 July 1720, in the sixty eighth year of his age. He was a husbandman, and he inherited his father's homestead on what is now North Atkinson Street in Newburyport, which is to say he stayed where he was put. Almost everything known about him is town business and the paperwork of his own death, and between them they make a fairly complete picture of an ordinary Newbury farmer of the second generation.

He took the oath of allegiance at Newbury in 1678, aged twenty six. In March 1683/4 the town chose him fence viewer at the upper end, which meant walking the boundaries and ruling on whether a man's fence was good enough to keep his animals out of his neighbour's corn. In December 1702 he sat on the committee to stint as to herbage, which is the same job at the scale of the whole common: deciding how many beasts each man might turn out on it. In June 1689 he took a contract from the town to keep one Evan Morris at ten shillings a week. That is poor relief before there was a word for it, and it is the sort of arrangement a town made with a man it trusted to feed somebody.

The tax inventory of August 1688 lists what he had: one head, one house, ten acres of plough land, ten acres of pasture, one horse, two oxen, four cows, a two year old, a yearling, fifteen sheep and two hogs. In the same year he was out with the militia under Captain Thomas Noyes. He was sergeant of the company, and he was one of the men who went to Amesbury.

He married Esther Bond about 1673. She was born at Newbury on 25 September 1655, daughter of John Bond and Hester Blakeley, and she outlived him.

If Sergt. Aquila Chase is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Sergt. Aquila Chase (1652-1720)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/sergt-aquila-chase-1652-1720-be70c9.