Daltons at the Focus of Our Project
Despite the many records of various Daltons in the home counties of the Virginia Piedmont, very little is documented about their relationship. The eldest appears to be Timothy Dalton who received a grant of land on Mechunk Creek in Hanover (later Louisa and Albemarle) County in 1732. Many have assumed that he was the progenitor of all these Daltons. Such speculation, and speculation about the ancestors of these settlers, has been spread by the growth of the internet. Despite rapid duplication of such speculation, no evidence – in DNA or documents – supports the assumption of this Timothy’s fathering the other Daltons nor the identity of their ancestors.
Documentary evidence does, however, speak to their migrations. Five migrated south into Southside VA in the 1740s: Timothy, Robert, John, David, and William. Evidence there links them in various ways. One of the Daltons from Albemarle, Samuel, left many of his children in Albemarle and migrated first to Georgia and then to the Mayo River in NC. Another, a second named David, resettled his children to Rutherford County NC during the Revolution. Others from the original counties and their secondary homes later migrated into western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, and throughout the Southern United States. Through DNA and careful work with documentary genealogy we are beginning to get some idea of the relationships among these migrants and their descendants. The project hopes to integrate documentary genealogy and Y-DNA study to test these assumptions, to develop firmer theories of the relationship among these Daltons, and to locate their common ancestors before they appear in the documentary record. Success at this project will help link today’s Daltons with the origins of their Virginia ancestors.Origini