>At 11:23 PM 09/02/1999 -0400, jcjv ( jcjv@shawneelink.com ) wrote: and Carole Dutton Malisiak ( malisiak@midohio.net ) replied 9/2 at 23:23: Hi, Duttons: And now I put my two cents in. I'm afraid I'm going to be picky, and something of a stick in the mud. But this stuff is FUN as well as FRUSTRATING, even for me when I'm being too picky <grin>. >> Carole, I devour all the information i receive regarding our esteemed >> family. So you know when the Duttons first entered Southern Illinois? [snip] >> Also what is the _earliest_ date recorded by our family? Was it >> first in England or earlier as in Viking Days???My family(Carolyn my >> wife age 30 Jonathan my son age 11 and Victoria my daughter age 4--with >> one more Dutton on the way Feb of 2000) all crowd around the screen to >> read these e-mails. Perhaps some day we can converse. Take care and God >> Bless!! [snip] >Hi jcjv, > >Congrats on your millennial baby! Well, actually, one of the later babies of the millenium <grin>. (I warned you in advance I was a picky stick-in-the-mud.) But congrats anyway! You could always extend the Dutton tree a wee bit more and go for a "real" millenium baby--you'll just barely have time! <just kidding, Carolyn!!!> >These are good questions; however, I do not have the answers. There are >quite a few folks on the Dutton list and maybe one of them would be able >to help you out with Illinois and Arkansas Duttons. [snip] Carole is doing all of us a great service by digging up contemporary or near-contemporary records and publishing them. She is especially to be commended for presenting the evidence to us, allowing us to draw our own conclusions about the connections of Hodard (Odard, Udard), the earliest to bear the name "Dutton" that we know of. That being said, you have a similar problem on your hands to the one I have, only about two hundred years later. You want to know where your Dutton line came from when it arrived in Illinois; I want to know where mine came from when it arrived in Massachusetts with Governor Winthrop in 1630. Until one can get back to the Duttons in England, all the work in the world on the 11th Century won't accomplish much, in the more formal sense, toward extending one's own pedigree. Many of us on the list are descended from the Dutton immigrants of Reading, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the first half of the 17th Century. My descent from Thomas Dutton of Reading is very well documented; the shakiest part of the line (actually two Dutton lines for me) is the part where it leaves Massachusetts for Vermont in the 1750's and 1760's, and even that is pretty solid. The secondary sources are good, I just haven't seen as many primary records as I would like. But Thomas is reported as being the son of John, maybe or maybe not. And it is not at all certain that John is the Mr. Dutton mentioned by Gov. Winthrop on the flyleaf of his journal, although it is likely enough. Thomas' children are established, I would say, and from him to later it is smooth sailing, "relatively speaking," except for the sticky subject of his wife's maiden name (it is often reported as "Palmer," but there is NO evidence for that which I have seen). But John's paternity? Hoo, BOY! There are only scraps and hints of clues about his line back. Since this Dutton branch is in the direct line of Joseph Smith, the founding father of the Mormon church, you would expect it to have been well researched, but the latest version of their PAF CDs has John, son of Sir Ralph, son of John. The elder of these two Johns has been combined with John Dutton of Pennsylvania (of about the same period as "Massachusetts John," give or take), giving him children born over nearly 100 years, making him his own grandfather, and worse (if that's possible). I would give miscellaneous body parts for credible evidence for two generations back in the ancestry of Thomas Dutton of Reading, Mass., who was born about 1619, probably in England. You, by the way, are faced with about an even chance that when you do find your Dutton family on its way west to Illinois, it will turn out to have been descended from either "Pennsylvania John" Dutton or "Massachusetts John." Pennsylvania John has, as I understand it, a much better link across the Atlantic than the Massachusetts branch. Others on the list would know better than I. For you, the current problem is getting TO the Atlantic, not getting ACROSS it. >Regarding the early Duttons and the earliest recorded date from our >family. There is no easy, short answer. > The professional genealogists would say that the earliest recorded >Dutton is Odard who is listed in the Domesday Book, 1086. You can read >about Odard on my website-- >http://genealogy.dutton.net/gen_perspect/odard.htm [snip] >The earliest Duttons believed that they were from Normandy >and were cousins to the Conqueror, but 1000 years later we cannot find >the paper trail to prove it (and the paper trail may no longer even >exist). You'll just have to condense that somehow for your >grandfather. Sorry, this is so long. > >Carole Carole's summary is about the most accurate statement you can get today about the ancestry of Odard/Hodard/Udard "of Dutton". However: even with the emphatically UN- solved problem of Thomas ?son of John ????son of Sir Ralph on my hands; I *still* "claim" all those Vikings, and Irish kings, and the Scottish king who was murdered by Macbeth, and Anglo-Saxon invaders of Roman Britain, as my ancestors. Without apology! (But WITH a disclaimer, if I put it in print.) And I suggest you do the same, and tell your kids all the good stories, and keep looking for the links that take you back "PROVABLY". Which is what this grand, frustrating, hobby is all about anyway. We all come from Adam by way of Noah, the only thing left is to show by convincing evidence just how that happened to go in our own cases. <big grin> Darrell Darrell A. Martin formerly of the Dutton District, Springfield, Vermont currently in exile in Addison, Illinois darrellm@sprynet.com