Ralph, Jonathan, George, James, and Joseph Morden were sons of George Morden, a Yorkshireman who had immigrated to Pennsylvania about 1743. In 1755, the family owned 55 acres on the Delaware River in Northampton County just north of Easton, Pennsylvania. In 1765, Ralph married Ann Durham and they had four sons and five daughters. Contrary to many stories, neither Ralph nor Ann were Quakers, according to Charles Field, one of his descendants.

One of Ralph's neighbours on the Delaware River was Robert Land. In 1780, Land, by now a courier for the British forces, asked Ralph to guide him past some sentries. Ralph, being a Quaker, had taken no part in the war but was always ready to help a friend, and so he agreed to help Land. Somehow the Patriots found out about Land's plans because they laid a trap; Robert Land was shot in the back but escaped. Ralph Morden was caught, tried, found guilty of treason, and executed.

Ann and the rest of the Morden family then were persecuted by the Patriots, who made life intolerable. Her sons James and John joined Sir John Johnson's King's Royal Regiment of New York, the regiment in which their uncle James had served until his death in Montreal in 1777. Her son Moses joined the New Jersey Volunteers. At the end of the war, the three sons met by chance at Fort Niagara in 1786 and decided to bring their mother and the rest of the family to Fort Niagara. Earlier in the year, John had visited Robert Land, who had settled on Burlington Bay. John had found that most of the good land had been taken so he had moved on to the Dundas Valley. Consequently, in 1787, after wintering over in Fort Niagara, the Morden family moved to the valley, where they became the first settlers.

As Loyalists, Ann and her sons David and Ralph were granted all of the land on which the older part of Dundas has been built. Ann's son Moses settled at what is now Rock Chapel and built a sawmill on Borer's Falls. Her brother-in-law George received land up on the mountain where Bullock's Corners stands. George's son, Jonathan Morden, built a mill on Spencer's Creek in 1798 near the Crooks Hollow Conservation Area. His house still stands on a hill on Crooks Hollow Road near Cramer Road, formerly Brock Road and the boundary between the Crooks land and the Morden land.

Jonathan Morden House

T. Roy Woodhouse adds a nice ironic twist to the story when he states, in his compilation of the History of Dundas, that a century and a half after the Americans hanged Ralph Morden, they gathered together to honour his descendant, Charles Lindbergh.