Episode #4: Zooey Deschanel
From ancestry.com/cs/us/who-do-you-think-you-are:
Self-proclaimed “gung-ho” feminist Zooey Deschanel had always heard that her spitfire grandmother Ann Orr came from a long line of Quakers and abolitionists. Now she wants to know the facts.
A visit with her parents provides Zooey with her first clue: the name of her great-great-grandmother, Martha Pownall, and confirmation that the Pownalls had ties to the antislavery movement.
Zooey heads to the Pownalls’ home state of Pennsylvania, a hotbed of abolitionism in the mid-1800s, to meet with a Quaker historian who has found her 5x great-grandparents, Elinor and Thomas Henderson, in Lancaster County. Elinor was a Quaker, but Thomas was not. However, Zooey learns that Quakers were encouraged to marry for love and follow their own convictions.
To learn more about the pair — and their daughter Sarah, a name Zooey’s grandmother had mentioned — Zooey searches Ancestry.com. And what she discovers in the 1800 Pennsylvania State Septennial Census is shocking: Thomas owned a slave.
Disappointed, Zooey now has more questions than answers. If Thomas owned a slave, how did his descendants end up involved in abolition?
