Tag: Arkansas Duttons

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.

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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.

Continue reading “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”