GENEALOGICAL AND FAMILY NOTES 9 



"Junto," a founder of the Philadelphia Library and 

 Surveyor General of Pennsylvania; on the other, as 

 descendant of William Biddle, a member of the Society 

 of Friends, who came to America in 1681. The Biddies 

 have for generations been prominent in banking, com- 

 merce, and as army and navy officers. 



William MacFunn, a bluff and hearty English seaman 

 of the old heroic type, was an officer of the British navy, 

 present with the British fleet at the siege of Quebec. 

 While stationed on the Delaware in 1752, he won the 

 hand of Lydia Biddle, then a young belle in Philadelphia 

 society. He was ordered to duty at Antigua, and there 

 became a victim of a tropical disease, of which he died 

 at Philadelphia in 1768, leaving a son, William Biddle 

 MacFunn. 



One of the maternal uncles of this son, having lost 

 his own children, left a handsome fortune to young 

 MacFunn on condition that he should change his surname 

 to Biddle. Accepting this condition he was later known 

 as William MacFunn Biddle. He was an accomplished 

 musician, a banker, a friend of Robert Morris, and was 

 drawn into some of the speculations in which the financiers 

 of the Revolution were engaged in the early days of the 

 Republic. In 1797 he married Lydia Spencer, of distin- 

 guished colonial lineage, and their daughter, Lydia 

 MacFunn Biddle, afterward became the wife of Samuel 

 Baird and the mother of the subject of this memoir. 



William MacFunn Biddle suffered as so many did 

 from the collapse of the speculation in land. At one time 

 reckoned the richest young man in Philadelphia, within 

 a year he went with Robert Morris to a debtor's prison, 

 where he remained until released by the passage of the 

 first United States Bankrupt law in 1 800. He died in 1 809. 



