For nearly 300 years, scores of writers, poets, collateral descendants, and even a few professionally-trained historians told the tale of a courageous, romantic, unmarried Quaker woman named Elizabeth Haddon, who almost single-handedly founded the suburban town of Haddonfield, New Jersey. Each account of her life increasingly embellished the truth. In the end, Haddonfield residents and local historians created a larger-than-life "founder" of their beloved town. The search for the "real" Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh started in the late 1960s when Historical Society of Haddonfield member Elizabeth A. Lyons, with the assistance of her brother, George Stuart Lyons, began to research the historical rather than the legendary figure. Over the next 40 years, through trips to libraries, archives and historic sites in England, the West Indies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Betty Lyons unearthed much previously undiscovered information about Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh. Betty wrote many drafts of a biography for Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh, each incorporating her new and important research. Her goal was to publish the biography in 2013, the 300th anniversary of the settlement of Haddonfield. With Betty’s untimely death in 2008, the project remained unfinished. In 2011, the Society asked Rutgers Professor Emeritus of History Jeffery M. Dorwart to look at the last draft of the Lyons manuscript and her extensive original research to see what could be done to publish it by 2013. Though based in part on the “Lyons Project” collection of documents, Betty’s notes and manuscript drafts on deposit in the Library of the Historical Society of Haddonfield, Jeffery Dorwart has rewritten this book as an original work with extensive new research. Stepping back from the Elizabeth legend, it examines Elizabeth’s world, a complex milieu of Quaker family, religious, social, business and economic factors in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century West New Jersey.