The Pidcock Story

For Scott’s 70th birthday I made an ancestry map for him. He has a well-documented family history that begins in the Washington Crossing area of the Delaware in Pennsylvania where the first John Pidcock arrived around 1680 and traded with the native Lenni Lenape.

My research showed that other branches of his family were settlers in the Pennington area of New Jersey and that he too had Scottish roots.

John Muirhead b 1660 was a Scottish Covenanter who fought in the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679. The Covenanters were protesting the Catholic retaking of the Presbyterian form of government that Scotland had begun in the Reformation. John and his brother were imprisoned for eight years in a castle dungeon in the north of Scotland before being exiled to America. John arrived in Perth Amboy and with his new wife settled in Ewing Township near Trenton, New Jersey. He was a founding trustee of the Ewing and later the Pennington Presbyterian churches.

He was the first sheriff in the county and ran the jail. Later he and his sons took part (along with eleven other Pidcock ancestors) in assisting George Washington before the Battle of Trenton.