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. 
