Actress Zooey Deschanel searches for the truth behind the rumour that her father's ancestors were involved in the anti-slavery movement in the lead-up to the American Civil War.

Her research takes her to Philadelphia, where she explores her family's Quaker heritage. She discovers that her four-times-great-grandmother, Sarah Pownall, was a committed abolitionist at a time when such political views could lead to public vilification and abuse. But Sarah's campaign against slavery was about more than politics; Zooey goes back to the site of Sarah's farm deep in the Pennsylvania countryside, where she discovers that the Pownall family provided shelter to slaves escaping from the South, at great risk to their own personal safety. And when armed slave owners arrived on the farm to take back escaped slaves, Sarah was faced with a terrible choice. Show less