Daniel Barber

Daniel Barber (October 1756 – 1834) was an American priest of the Episcopal Church priest who became a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. b.Simsbury, Connecticut, U.S.A. – d.1834 at Saint Inigoes, Maryland Life Barber was born in Simsbury, Connecticut. Barber served two terms as a soldier in the Continental Army. At thirty years old, he was ordained a minister of the Episcopal Church at Schenectady, New York. He married Chloe Case, daughter of Judge Owen of Simsbury, Connecticut, and about 1787, with his wife, his three sons, and a daughter, moved to Claremont, New Hampshire. He exercised the duties of the ministry at the Union Church for thirty years. The reading of a Catholic book opened up for him the issue of the validity of Anglican orders, by impugning Archbishop Parker's consecration. He visited for a conference Bishop Cheverus, then a priest in Boston. Cheverus answered his questions and gave him a number of books to read. In 1807, at the instance of her parents, he baptized Fanny Allen, daughter of General Ethan Allen, who subsequently became a convert and died a nun in the convent of the Hotel-Dieu, Montreal. A visit he made there greatly impressed him, and Miss Allen's change of faith indirectly had much to do with his own conversion.