(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.
Continue reading “The Ancestry of Zachariah Dutton: How He Fits Into the Duttons of Charles County, Maryland”
Cousins, there’s been a breakthrough in DNA research toward identifying Zachariah Dutton’s paternal ancestry. Y-DNA research has uncovered evidence that Zachariah’s father may have been an O’Caine, of the same family as Judith O’Caine who married Matthew Dutton of Charles County, Maryland. This is still a speculation and not proof, but it is a significant advance over what we knew before. Here is an account of how we’ve come to this conclusion. Let me begin by giving a brief overview of the science involved in this discovery, and then the background of the research leading up to it. Finally, I will relate the recent developments that brought us to this discovery.