10 SPENCER FULLERTON BAIRD 
Lydia Spencer, his wife, traced her lineage to Thomas 
Wardell and Isaac Perkins, who were among the first 
comers to the colony of Massachusetts Bay. According 
to Professor Goode, they became disciples of Ann Hutchin- 
son in the Antinomian controversy of 1636, were banished 
from the colony in company with the Rev. John Wheel- 
wright, and assisted in founding the town of Exeter in New 
Hampshire. Their children, Eliakim Wardell* and Lydia 
Perkins, married in 1659, joined the Society of Friends 
and on account of religious persecution removed in 1663 
to Long Island, and in 1666 to Shrewsbury, East Jersey. 
The first monthly meeting of Friends in the Province 
of New Jersey was at Shrewsbury in 1666. Families 
from New England and Long Island were among the 
participants. George Fox visited Shrewsbury twice in 
1672. Among the members of these meetings who were 
settled in Shrewsbury prior to 1682 are found Eliakim 
Wardell and Thomas Eatton. The latter, who came to 
3A note from one of the family states that Thomas Wardell, 
father of Eliakim, was one of the victims of the witchcraft delusion 
at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Eliakim was a deputy to the Gen- 
eral Assembly from 1667 to 1688; magistrate of Shrewsbury, New 
Jersey, in 1678, and High Sheriff from 1683 to 1685. 
Isaac Perkins, father of Lydia, who came from Hampton, Massa- 
chusetts, is described as a wealthy merchant of Boston and founder 
of the well-known Boston family of that name. The result of an 
attempt to force his daughter Lydia to attend orthodox religious 
services in Salem is thus described by her descendant, Jonathan 
Dickinson Sergeant, of Philadelphia: 
“She was several times commanded to go to church and heavy 
fines imposed, because being of a different faith she would not. At 
last finding it impossible to escape, this high tempered young woman, 
who was also a remarkably beautiful one, appeared in church as 
God made her, saying that she thus bore testimony to the nakedness 
of the faith of her enemies.”’ 
