In fact, a quick follow up:

I suspect your church was a Quaker church. And your ancestors were likely diggers. In the 1600s during the civil war the diggers were like Robin Hood. They were rebels against the puritans and the royalists. They took from the rich, and they gave to the poor. It would not surprise me in the slightest if this context is relevant to what you have said, it very much checks out. Both groups, diggers and Quakers, who often overlapped, were terribly persecuted. There must've been a lot of refugees.