GENEALOGICAL AND FAMILY NOTES 15 



the disastrous failure of the land speculations in which 

 her husband and Robert Morris with many others were 

 engaged, and which caused their imprisonment for debt, 

 his business never recovered and he died a poor man, 

 leaving his widow and young family destitute. Her 

 relatives offered to do all in their power, but she was a 

 woman of independent spirit and put her own shoulder 

 to the wheel in a manner more like that expected of women 

 at the end rather than at the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century. By a successful business venture in which she 

 embarked, and aided by an unexpected windfall from 

 another quarter, she was enabled not only to educate 

 her children but at last to find herself the possessor of 

 what was in those days a competency. After the marriage 

 of her second daughter Mrs. Penrose, she removed to 

 Carlisle, where she built a comfortable house and passed 

 the remainder of her life, dying at the age of ninety-two. 

 She was very active up to the close of her life and was a 

 person of very proud and independent spirit. She had 

 no fear whatever of disregarding the smaller convention- 

 alities in anything which she herself deemed right and 

 dignified. Her granddaughters would sometimes object 

 to wearing some garment, which she considered suitable, 

 on the ground that it was not the fashion, and would be 

 met with the crushing reply 'When I was young anything 

 that Miss Spencer wore was the fashion.' 



In his notes on the genealogy of Professor Baird, Pro- 

 fessor Goode observes: "Of the thirty-two ancestors in 

 the sixth degree, one, or perhaps two, were of Swedish 

 blood, the others were either natives of Great Britain 

 or colonial descendants of natives, established in America. 

 There was a mixture of Scotch or Scotch-Irish blood, 

 especially in the lines of his paternal great-grandparents. 



