GENEALOGICAL AND FAMILY NOTES 9 
“Junto,” a founder of the Philadelphia Library and 
Surveyor General of Pennsylvania; on the other, as 
descendant of William Biddle, a member of the Society 
of Friends, who came to America in 1681. The Biddles 
have for generations been prominent in banking, com- 
merce, and as army and navy Officers. 
William MacFunn, a bluff and hearty English seaman 
of the old heroic type, was an officer of the British navy, 
present with the British fleet at the siege of Quebec. 
While stationed on the Delaware in 1752, he won the 
hand of Lydia Biddle, then a young belle in Philadelphia 
society. He was ordered to duty at Antigua, and there 
became a victim of a tropical disease, of which he died 
at Philadelphia in 1768, leaving a son, William Biddle 
MacFunn. 
One of the maternal uncles of this son, having lost 
his own children, left a handsome fortune to young 
MacFunn on condition that he should change his surname 
to Biddle. Accepting this condition he was later known 
as William MacFunn Biddle. He was an accomplished 
musician, a banker, a friend of Robert Morris, and was 
drawn into some of the speculations in which the financiers 
of the Revolution were engaged in the early days of the 
Republic. In 1797 he married Lydia Spencer, of distin- 
guished colonial lineage, and their daughter, Lydia 
MacFunn Biddle, afterward became the wife of Samuel 
Baird and the mother of the subject of this memoir. 
William MacFunn Biddle suffered as so many did 
from the collapse of the speculation in land. At one time 
reckoned the richest young man in Philadelphia, within 
a year he went with Robert Morris to a debtor’s prison, 
where he remained until released by the passage of the 
first United States Bankrupt lawin 1800. He died in 1809. 
