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.
Continue reading “Jeremiah Dutton, Ancestor of Southern Duttons: Picking up a trail gone cold”