160 The Smithsonian Institution 



Professor Baird's mother's father, William McFunn Biddle, 

 was the son of William McFunn, an officer of the British 

 Navy, who was present with the fleet at the siege of Quebec, 

 and while stationed on the Delaware was married, in 1752, to 

 Lydia Biddle. Ordered to duty at Antigua, he contracted a 

 disease which caused his death, at Philadelphia, in 1768. In 

 that most interesting volume, the " Autobiography of Charles 

 Biddle," are occasional references to Captain McFunn, who 

 was evidently a bluff and hardy English seaman of the old 

 heroic type. His son, William Biddle McFunn, became, by 

 transposition of his two last names, William McFunn Biddle. 

 He was a banker, an accomplished musician, and the friend 

 of Robert Morris, and became involved in some of the ambi- 

 tious projects which "the financier of the Revolution" or- 

 ganized in the early days of the Republic especially the 

 American Land Company. At one time the richest young 

 man in Philadelphia, he went with Morris to a debtor's cell, 

 where he remained until relieved by the passage of the first 

 United States bankrupt law, in 1800. His mother, Lydia 

 Biddle, belonged to an old Philadelphia family, for many gen- 

 erations prominent in commercial and banking enterprises 

 and as officers in the Army and Navy, the descendants of 

 William Biddle, one of the first Quaker colonists of Penn- 

 sylvania. She was descended maternally from Nicholas 

 Scull, the friend of Franklin, one of the earliest members of 

 the American Philosophical Society, and the first surveyor- 

 general of Pennsylvania. 



His mother's mother, Lydia Spencer Biddle, survived her 

 husband for half a century, and died in 1858 at the age of 

 ninety-three. Her memories of the Revolution were vivid, 

 for her father was the patriot preacher Elihu Spencer, who 

 had been a chaplain in the French and Indian Wars, and was 

 despatched by Congress to North Carolina to aid in winning 



