George Ferris, Sr.

Note about wives

Several children of George emigrated to New Brunswick, Canada. Another Ferris without known parents also emigrated there on her way with her husband Ezekiel Cudney to Ontario: Mary Phebe Ferris. I suggest that Mary Phebe was thus a heretofore-unknown member of George's family.

DNA ties a descendant of Mary Phebe to a known descendant of the Daniels family. The only way this could happen is if Mary Phebe was the daughter of a daughter of Jonathan Daniels, who traveled with his family from New London CT to Woodbridge, NJ, stopping for several years along the way in each place. One place was Rye, New York, and we already suspect another daughter of his married there in 1752. Web trees give the name of George's wife as Margaret Perkins, who died in 1785, but if you look at George's family it definitely is quite different starting around 1760. So my solution is that George married two Margarets - his first wife was Margaret Daniels, and his third was Margaret Perkins. (In between, there was Charity Thomas). There would have to be two Margarets because there was no Margaret Ferris mentioned in Jonathan Daniels' 1764 will.

Was George Ferris a Loyalist?

George had two children who emigrated to New Brunswick, and he also had a nephew (son of brother Glibert Ferris) who was a prominent loyalist as well. However, the rest of George's known children stayed in New York State, as did George himself, so it is unclear whether he too was a Loyalist himself.

I suppose it would be best said that his entire branch of the Ferris family were "casual Loyalists" save for the few who weren't very quiet about it.

George did apparently live in Rye, NY, for all of his first marriage. This was a known hotspot for Tory sympathizers. His second marriage took place only a few miles from Rye, in Harrisons Precinct. But later he moved to White Plains, where his later children were born, and where most of them married.

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: May 30 2022, 0:38:30 UTC