DNA Discovery: A Long-Lost Daughter of John Dutton and Omah Parrish

Even as I was writing my last post, on James Dutton and the family of John Dutton and Omah Parrish, it occurred to me that someday, DNA might help uncover the unidentified children of John and Omah, whom we knew only as unnamed children on the 1820 census. But scarcely before the digital ink had dried, only an hour or two after I posted it, it happened. I discovered what appears to be a long-lost daughter of John Dutton and Omah Parrish.

I first discovered the lady through a DNA match of my Dutton great-aunt on Ancestry.com. She was named Mary Jane Dutton (Ancestry Tree), married to John Richardson (no known relation to my Richardsons), and she lived in Walker County, Alabama. She was born ca. 1819 in North Carolina. Just as finding James Dutton’s 1807 birth in North Carolina did — this immediately set off alarm bells. In 1820, John Dutton had an unidentified daughter born between 1810 and 1820.

The more I examined her, the better she looked:

• Mary Jane Dutton was born ca. 1819 in North Carolina.
• According to the 1880 census of Walker County, her father was born in Maryland (where John Dutton was born).
• She named a daughter Oma(h). A granddaughter was also named that.
• On the 1840 census of Walker County, John Richardson and his wife, then newlyweds, were listed living “next door” to James Dutton.

Mary Jane married her husband John Richardson in about 1840 in Walker County — which explains the unfortunate lack of a marriage record. The Walker County courthouse was burned in 1865 by Union troops.

But her maiden name of Dutton was indicated by the death record of her daughter, Mary E. (Richardson) Barton (d. 1932). This is also attested to by various family trees I found on Ancestry and around the Web.

A Complication and a Solution

There is a complication. It is not unanimous among Mary Jane Richardson’s descendants that her maiden name was Dutton. About half of the trees I find on Ancestry list her name as Ireland. I am fairly certain this is incorrect — perhaps the product of Ancestry’s bad “hints,” propagated around between trees — since there is another John Richardson in Walker County, married  to another Mary Jane, whose maiden name was Ireland. This is supported by the death records of this couple’s documented children: America Elizabeth Cox
(FamilySearch.org free source), William Elijah Richardson, Samuel Thomas Richardson, James David Richardson (Ancestry.com subscription required). Now, this is very clearly a different woman, a different couple, even a different generation, than the above John and Mary Jane Richardson, who were born about 1820. The odds that there would be two John Richardsons and two Mary Jane Irelands in the same county at the same time are pretty low, especially when there are records that indicate otherwise.

UPDATE: It appears, in fact, that this other John Richardson, who was born 1844 and who married Mary Jane Ireland, is the son of John Richardson and Mary Jane Dutton.

DNA Confirms

DNA has not yet confirmed the specific connection of Mary Jane Dutton to John Dutton and Omah Parrish — but it has certainly proved that Mary Jane Dutton belongs to the family of Zachariah Dutton. On AncestryDNA, I’ve so far found six different DNA tests from descendants of John Richardson and Mary Jane Dutton, from all different branches of their family. My great-aunt Lorene Dutton matches each one of these, and shares several of the matches with a half-dozen other Zachariah Dutton descendants from all different branches.

On Family Tree DNA, I was able to identify one of the tests from AncestryDNA, and examine her match in the chromosome browser. Sure enough, the match — shared with Lorene Dutton (a William Dutton descendant), Elizabeth Hughes (a Mary Jane Dutton Richardson descendant), Lauren Jones and Harold Clifton Northum (Samuel Sneed Dutton descendants from different lines) — indicates the same shared segment of DNA on Chromosome 11. All of these cousins inherited that segment from a common ancestor: Zachariah Dutton or his wife.

I am working on collecting some DNA results from descendants of James Dutton and Thomas Dutton, which I hope will indicate a closer genetic proximity to descendants of Mary Jane Dutton Richardson than to other cousins, and strengthen the case for all being the children of John Dutton and Omah Parrish. If you are a descendant of James Dutton or Thomas Dutton, and have already done a DNA test or are willing to do one, you can help. Please contact me for more details.

Conclusion

Based on a mounting collection of both DNA results and compelling records, I believe I’ve identified a long-lost daughter of John Dutton and Omah Parrish. Born in ca. 1819 in North Carolina, Mary Jane Dutton Richardson is the right age to be John Dutton’s unknown daughter from the 1820 census. She stated on the 1880 census that her father was born in Maryland, as John Dutton would have been. She named a daughter Oma(h). And in 1840, having just married her husband John Richardson, she was living next door to James Dutton in Walker County, Alabama.

DNA matches between Mary Jane Richardson’s descendant and other descendants of Zachariah Dutton and diverse and conclusive. With little doubt, she does belong to this family. Now, there is still one son of John and Omah still unaccounted for, born between 1810 and 1820, younger than Thomas (born 1809) and probably older than Mary Jane (born ca. 1819). The present discovery gives hope that someday, he will turn up also.

Next up: A summary of what we know about Zachariah Dutton’s ancestry, his unknown wife, and DNA developments that may shed light on both.