From Kevin Harris, kevin@@harfam.org 29 October 2008: This is from a county history from the early twentieth century.
"While Daniel Ferree was of French ancestry with military blood in his veins, and not much given to the quiet, sedate life of Friends, he married Lydia Elliott, who was among the blue blooded North Carolina Quaker families, and some of her relatives were slaveholders according to the custom of the community. However, there was a revolt among orthodox Quakers against the institution of slavery, and knowing they could not overthrow it they came into the Northwest territory to escape it. Daniel Ferree and his wife joined this exodus early in the nineteenth century, but he did not become a friend until long after taking up his residence in Morgan county, Indiana. The Quakers had some restrictions that did not suit him—his life having been in decided contrast to their peace-loving attributes.
It is reasonably inferred that the wife ruled when the Ferree family left the country where slavery existed, but after they came to Morgan county and when the environment was so different from the Southland, her church became his church,
and their children grew up Friends. Evan Harvey Ferree remembers hearing his father tell of some of the obstacles in the way of this grandfather with Huguenot blood in his veins in reconciling the Quaker attitude toward slavery and his own early training, but in time he amalgamated with the society about him. It is hard for a strong nature to completely revolutionize itself, but that is what occurred in the life of Daniel Ferree, founder of the well known Grant county branch of the Ferree family in America."
