Giles Isaac

Brief Life History of Giles

When Giles Isaac was christened on 30 December 1752, in Saint Helena, his father, Gabriel Isacke, was 35 and his mother, Mary SMITH, was 32. He died in 1765, in his hometown, at the age of 13.

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Family Time Line

Gabriel Isacke
1717–1780
Mary SMITH
1720–1752
Penelope Isaac
1742–
Eleanor Isacke
1748–1749
Gabriel Isaac
1755–1806
Sutton Isaac
1744–
Giles Isaac
1752–1765
Frederick Isaac
1774–

Sources (1)

  • Giles Isaac, 'MyHeritage Family Trees'

Name Meaning

Jewish, English, Welsh, and French: from the Biblical Hebrew personal name Yishaq ‘he laughs’. This was the name of the son of Abraham (Genesis 21:3) by his wife Sarah. The traditional explanation of the name is that Abraham and Sarah laughed with joy at the birth of a son to them in their old age, but a more plausible explanation is that the name originally meant ‘may God laugh’, i.e. ‘smile on him’. Like Abraham , this name has always been immensely popular among Jews, but was also widely used in medieval Europe among Christians. Hence it is the surname of many gentile families as well as Jews. In England and Wales it was one of the Old Testament names that were particularly popular among Nonconformists in the 17th–19th centuries, which accounts for its frequency as a Welsh surname. (Welsh surnames were generally formed much later than English ones.) In eastern Europe the personal name in its various vernacular forms was popular in Orthodox (Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian), Catholic (Polish), and Protestant (Czech) Churches. It was borne by a 5th-century father of the Armenian Church and by a Spanish martyr executed by the Moorish rulers of Cordoba in AD 851 on account of his tireless polemics against Islam. In North America, the English form of the surname has absorbed cognates from other languages, e.g. Assyrian/Chaldean Iskhaq or Ishak , Hungarian Izsák, and Slovenian Izak, and also their patronymics, e.g. Serbian Isakov . The name Isaac is also found among Christians in southern India, but since South Indians traditionally do not have hereditary surnames, the southern Indian name was in most cases registered as such only after immigration of its bearers to the US. Compare Issac .

Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006.

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