Joseph T. Richardson

The Ancestry of Zachariah Dutton: How He Fits Into the Duttons of Charles County, Maryland

(Revised and updated July 2024)

Our progenitor Zachariah Dutton () first appeared in records in Charles County, Maryland, in the 1770s. The earliest record I have identified in which he appeared is a 1772 court appearance. There had been a Dutton family living in Charles County since 1680, when Thomas Dutton immigrated. Thomas Dutton married Elizabeth Hill, and descendants of their family continue to live in Charles County today.

Since the beginning of my research, we assumed that Zachariah Dutton was somehow connected to Thomas Dutton. Over the years, I put out various speculations as to how, and at some point nearly twenty years ago, one speculation stuck, and has become dominant in online family trees and especially Ancestry “hints”: that Zachariah Dutton was the son of Gerrard Dutton (born about 1732), son of Matthew Dutton, son of Thomas. This speculation is provably not the case. We have written documentation that definitively proves that Zachariah Dutton was not the son of Gerrard Dutton. In addition, Y-DNA research definitively shows that Zachariah Dutton’s paternal line was not the line of the Duttons of Charles County, Maryland. Zachariah Dutton’s father was not a Dutton.

We have written documentation that definitively proves that Zachariah Dutton was not the son of Gerrard Dutton.

Y-DNA research shows that Zachariah Dutton’s father was not a Dutton at all.

I’ve been trying to correct this error ever since. But sadly, the sense of community and collaboration I once felt we shared as Zachariah Dutton researchers broke down a long time ago. I have been hoping to rebuild that in our online community on Facebook.

In this article, I will try to correct this mistaken conclusion and clear up confusion. I will lay out exactly what we know about Zachariah Dutton and his relation to the Duttons of Charles County, Maryland, from primary sources, and then detail what we have learned from DNA research.

Jeremiah Dutton, Ancestor of Southern Duttons: Picking up a trail gone cold

In the last post, we followed the trail of Henry G. Dutton (born 1830 in South Carolina, died 1911 in Morgan County, Alabama), his father, Thomas C. Dutton (born about 1797 in Elbert County, Georgia, died after 1860), and his father, Thomas Dutton Sr. (born about 1770). We traced the family back to Elbert County, Georgia, on the state line with South Carolina, with ancestors that were born in both states, suggesting that they were moving back and forth easily.

And we found a positive Y-DNA match between a descendant of Henry G. Dutton and a descendant of another Dutton family with origins in South Carolina — the family of John Dutton (born about 1775 in South Carolina, died about 1858 in Arkansas), who was the father of James Cass Dutton (born about 1808 in Virginia, died 1867 in Arkansas) and Rev. Moses P. Dutton (born about 1816 in Virginia, died 1897 in Arkansas). Last time, I argued that this Y-DNA lineage has the marks of being a very old Dutton family with probable origins in Cheshire, England. This time, I will return to the more recent ancestry of the family — which possibly ties into the Jeremiah Dutton family of South Carolina.

Writing this article has been both fascinating and frustrating. It takes me back some twenty-five years, when Sue Dutton Rodgers and a group of other genealogists were working on Jeremiah Dutton and had their own RootsWeb mailing list. This effort led me to digging through my oldest email archives. Now, due to simple time and mortality, so many of those people are no longer with us. But also, due to negligence and mismanagement, so much of their research is also lost. So as much as I will attempt to reconstruct it, I fear I may resort to starting over from scratch.

Two Southern U.S. Dutton Families Find Their Y-DNA Roots, Part 2: Henry G. Dutton of Alabama, Thomas C. Dutton of Georgia, and Related Families

Previously: Samuel Dutton of Lawrence County, Alabama, Aaron Dutton of Jefferson County, Alabama, and the Duttons of Blount County, Alabama.

I can remember, even as a young child, opening the local phone book and going down the list of everyone named Dutton, in the area of Decatur, Alabama, and Hartselle, and Danville, and Moulton. My Duttons — the few who were still around — lived in Danville or Massey. But there were a lot I didn’t know in Hartselle and Moulton, and even then, I wondered how they were connected.

William Dutton, my ancestor, only had one son, and his son, James Zachariah Dutton, only had one son who lived to have sons, my great-grandfather, Dan Dutton. By a similar process, of sons dying young, not having children or having only daughters, or moving away from the area, the descendants of Zachariah Dutton in Morgan County, Alabama, named Dutton, have gradually dwindled to only a handful. Duttons were much more prolific in neighboring Lawrence County, with a bumper crop of descendants of Zachariah’s sons Stephen Dutton and Edmond Dutton flourishing to this day. Some of those have overflowed back into Morgan County.

But in large part, the people named Dutton in Morgan County these days are not descended from Zachariah Dutton at all. Many of them trace their ancestry to a man who came here from Georgia just after the Civil War, Henry G. Dutton (born about 1830 in South Carolina, died 19 Jan 1911 in Lacon, Morgan County, Alabama), who was also prolific, having a dozen children.

I knew pretty quickly that Henry G. Dutton didn’t seem to “fit” with the Zachariah Dutton family, who all came to Alabama from North Carolina by way of Tennessee, and most of them before the Civil War. But who he was connected to has been a perplexing question for all the years of my research.

Two Southern U.S. Dutton Families Find Their Y-DNA Roots, Part 1: Samuel Dutton of Lawrence County, Alabama, and the Duttons of Blount County, Alabama

Since the time I began my research on the Dutton family about twenty-five years ago, there have been multiple Dutton families here in the southern U.S. and even in my region of North Alabama that contradicted my notion that “with a name like Dutton, they all must be related.” Two families in particular have been here in the midst of my Zachariah Dutton family all this time, yet by all appearances were not related: the family of Henry G. Dutton (born about 1829 in Georgia, died 1911 in Morgan County, Alabama), and the family of Samuel Dutton (born perhaps about 1780 in Pennsylvania, died 1822 in Lawrence County, Alabama) and his brother Aaron Dutton (born about 1785 in Pennsylvania, died after 1850 in Jefferson County, Alabama). Who they did relate to has largely been a mystery, until last year when I was able to conduct Y-DNA tests on both of them. The fascinating answers I discovered renewed my original assertion, that maybe with a name like Dutton, they are all related.

The Ancestry of James Matlock Kitchens

The grave of James Matlock Kitchens, Kitchens-Brown Cemetery, west of Jasper, Alabama, from a 1930s photo. The grave is no longer identifiable.

Full research report:
The Ancestry of James Matlock Kitchens (PDF)

A little while ago, I made a research trip to Walker County, Alabama, and I shared with you here the Civil War letter of James Matlock Kitchens. James Matlock Kitchens (1796–1868) was a neighbor and friend to our early Duttons in Basham’s Gap, Alabama, a fellow Baptist with Stephen Penn and Edmond Dutton (he vouched for Stephen Penn in his Revolutionary pension application in 1832) and later became a Baptist preacher himself. He is the ancestor of a couple of branches of Duttons: his daughter Elizabeth Kitchens married Thomas Dutton, and his daughter Mary Kitchens married Harvey W. Hamilton, whose son Christopher Columbus Hamilton married Elizabeth Ann Dutton. There are lots of other family connections as well, as James Kitchens moved with the Duttons, Sparks, Hogans, and many other Basham’s Gap families down to Walker County. The Kitchens family ties in mainly to the family of John Dutton (b. 1778), son of Zachariah Dutton, whose family will be the subject of my next Dutton volume.

Anyway, that trip and that letter reignited my interest in the Kitchens family, and with Mary Kay Coker, a Kitchens descendant, I’ve been doing some research in DNA and records to determine James Matlock Kitchens’ origins and ancestry. For quite a number of years, online trees have attributed to James Matlock Kitchens the father “Christopher Kitchens” — based on the assumption that an old man named Christopher, age 80, listed in James Kitchens’ household on the 1850 census was James’s father.

1850 federal census, Walker County, Alabama, James Kitchens household. — 1850 Federal Census, Walker County, Alabama, household of James Kitchens.

But there was no trace anywhere in records, in Alabama, Tennessee, or Virginia, of anyone named Christopher Kitchens. Mary Kay was convinced even long before I was that there was no such person as Christopher Kitchens — that this person on the census was someone else entirely, namely Christopher Acuff, who appeared in other records with James Kitchens and the Kitchens family in Alabama and Tennessee, and was more than likely James’s uncle.

Few things spur me to greater research more than incorrect assumptions that are accepted as fact, especially those based not on research but on copying other people’s trees. So we determined to find the true origins of James Matlock Kitchens. Using a collection of well-placed DNA tests, and some outstanding archival research by Mary Kay Coker, we very soon found the trail.

The Letter of James Matlock Kitchens

Years ago, a transcription of the letter of James Matlock Kitchens came to my attention, to my great excitement and that of many Dutton cousins. This past week I made a genealogy research trip to Jasper, Walker County, Alabama, where at the library I found a photocopy of the original letter. I’d like to share the letter again with you.

James Matlock Kitchens (1796–1868) was a farmer and Baptist minister, a pioneer settler of Lawrence County, Alabama, about 1817, and then of Walker County, Alabama, about 1838. He joined a large migration of family and neighbors from the Basham’s Gap community to the vicinity of Jasper, shortly after the opening of a road between those places. The Kitchens family intermarried very closely with the Dutton family, as well as the Brown, Irwin, Hamilton, and Sparks families, with whom the Duttons were also intermarried. Together these families formed a tight-knit network of kinship, as his letter below will show.

James Matlock Kitchens Letter Page 1 — Page 1 of the 15 Feb 1863 letter from James Matlock Kitchens of Walker County, Alabama.

James Matlock Kitchens Letter Page 2 — Page 1 of the 15 Feb 1863 letter from James Matlock Kitchens of Walker County, Alabama.

Dutton book available for pre-order

I am pleased to announce that my Dutton book, entitled Stories from the Old House: William Dutton (c.1777-c.1855) of Morgan County, Alabama, and His Descendants, is now available for pre-sale. It features an introduction to the family of Zachariah Dutton, his ancestors in Cheshire, England, and Charles County, Maryland, and then goes on to focus on the family of my ancestor William Dutton, Zachariah’s son. It includes highlights of a number of other North Alabama families, including Hogan, Sparks, Pell, Otwell, McDonald, Staples, Wilhite, Johnson, Minor and Wright. The pre-order price if $59.95. I hope to have the book in your hands by Christmas. At a later date, I will also release the book as an e-book. Order yours today! https://www.zdutton.org/book.

Lorene Dutton Bryant celebrates 100th

This month, my dear great-aunt Lorene Dutton Bryant celebrates her one hundredth birthday. Over the years she’s been a cherished aunt and friend and a great help in the family history through stories and pictures and DNA. Let’s celebrate with her! This story is written by Lorene’s niece Dana Lamb.

The Ancestry of Zachariah Dutton: How He Fits Into the Duttons of Charles County, Maryland

(A newer, up-to-date version of this article is here.)

Our progenitor Zachariah Dutton (Ancestry Tree) first appears in records in Charles County, Maryland, in 1778. There had been a Dutton family living in Charles County since 1680, the descendants of Thomas Dutton and Elizabeth Hill, and we have always believed that Zachariah Dutton is connected to them somehow.

There has been a lot of speculation about Zachariah’s ancestral connections, some of which has become quite pervasive in public family trees on Ancestry.com. On Ancestry, it appears that if many people list something, it tends to be accepted as true — but often, misinformation is repeated by almost everybody as fact simply because it is repeated by almost everybody. In the case of Zachariah Dutton, we have documentation that disproves the apparent common consensus — that Zachariah was the son of Gerrard Dutton of Charles County, Maryland — and DNA that indicates he is not a patrilineal descendant of these Duttons at all.

In this article, I would like to do my best to clear up some of this confusion, first by summarizing what we know of Zachariah Dutton, then by examining the possible points where Zachariah could connect to the family of Thomas Dutton of Charles County, and finally by examining the DNA evidence.

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.