2 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 
older renderings of the name included Bard, Barde, 
Beard, Beart, Byrd, and Bayard; the spelling Baird is 
noted only from the latter part of the sixteenth century. 
The arms of the families bearing the name usually include 
a wild boar or a bear, with the motto ‘‘ Dominus fecit.”’ 
The family were slow to renounce Catholicism after 
the Reformation, and still slower to cease their allegiance 
to the Stuarts. Yet some of them adhered to the Scottish 
church, and in the swinging of the political pendulum 
became High Sheriffs, Commissaries, and dignitaries of 
sorts. Among those of the name was at least one High 
Admiral, a Governor of Surinam (in the Dutch service), 
an English Resident in India, many knights and more 
than one baronet. The earliest American settler noted 
by Fraser is Patrick, son of Sir James Baird of Auch- 
medden, who settled in Philadelphia as a surgeon early 
in the eighteenth century, and returned, a widower, to 
Edinburgh in 1754. From which branch of this numerous 
and honorable family the Pennsylvania Bairds sprang 
is not evident from the data at hand. No names of artists, 
literary men or naturalists adorn Mr. Fraser’s genealogies. 
Men of action, of law, and of trade abound in them. An 
old legend offers the only evidence that the family took 
any interest in ornithology. According to a prophecy of 
Thomas the Rhymer (it ran) there “‘would always be 
an eagle in the crags of Pennan while there was a Baird 
in Auchmedden;” and there always was one down to the 
time when the Earl of Aberdeen purchased the estate 
from the Bairds. ‘Then the eagles disappeared. But 
when his eldest son, Lord Haddo, married Miss Christian 
Baird of Newbyth, the eagles returned to the rocks, and 
continued there until the estate passed into the hands of 
the Hon. William Gordon, when they again departed. 
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