DNA testing – Zachariah Dutton Genealogy Web

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 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.

How We Connected James Dutton of Walker County, Alabama to the Family Tree

These days, it’s a commonplace assumption that James Dutton of Walker County, Alabama — the progenitor of a large family of descendants in central Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond — was the son of John Dutton, the son of Zachariah Dutton, and his wife Omah Parrish. But this was not always the case. When I began doing research some twenty years ago, published family trees ended with James Dutton, his parentage unknown. This article will explain how we came to connect James Dutton to John Dutton, and the evidence for doing so.

The State of the Dutton 2017

(Or, “Make Zachariah Dutton Great Again!”)

Part I: A Personal Appeal

My dear cousins,

I’m writing this update as an overview of the state of research into Zachariah Dutton, his ancestors, and his descendants. As you may know, I’ve been in school for a long, long time. I finished two degrees in history, and then faced with a poor job market, decided to do another degree in computer science. School has been dominating my attention for the past several years, so I’m sad to say, I’ve fallen out of touch with a lot of you and let my Dutton research fall by the wayside. Speaking for myself, the State of the Dutton has been kind of meager.