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”