The Girls' Team Strikes Out

 

If my search for matrilineal descendants of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter's wives were a baseball game, I'd say we are about to head into the ninth inning, and the girls' team just struck out.

After reviewing the family line of Carter daughter Sarah, wife of William Sutton, I thought it might be handy to simply skip over the next daughters and head straight to the other Carter daughter who also happened to marry a Sutton family member. That would be Judith Carter, third daughter of Hannah Chew, the wife who survived John Carter.

Judith and her husband, Joseph Sutton—who, incidentally, was brother of Sarah Carter's husband William Sutton—had four children. Of those four, only one was a daughter: Maria Chew Sutton. According to the 1941 Suttons of Caroline County, Virginia, this Maria was born in 1790. By 1811, she had married her double first cousin, John Carter Sutton, son of her Carter aunt, Sarah, and her Sutton uncle, William. The marriage didn't last long. After giving birth to her only son, John Oliver Sutton, Maria apparently died within the subsequent year. Strike one.

Well, I guess I should have stuck with protocol and continued the line of Carter daughters by age ranking. So, back we go to Sarah Carter's next youngest sister, Margaret, the last of the daughters said to have been born to John Carter's wife Elizabeth Armistead, the wife whose missing documentation I've been puzzled by. At first glance, though, we can easily see that when this mom came to bat, she'd easily be strike two: to her husband, John Marshall, Margaret bore several children, all of whom were sons.

At this point, we move on to Mary Beverley Carter, the oldest child of John Carter's final wife, Hannah Chew. Mary Beverley became wife of D.A.R. Patriot Richard Stevens. At this point, I didn't quite realize I was about to face up to strike three, since Mary Beverley claimed at least three surviving daughters: Lucy Carter Stevens, Mary Chew Stevens, and Judith M. Stevens.

Of those three possibilities, though, I have yet to find confirming documentation. It appears that Lucy Carter Stevens never married. Mary Chew Stevens did marry, and bore her husband, Samuel Winston, one son and one daughter—but as far as I can find, that daughter never married. And all I can find for the third daughter, Judith, was one son. Until more research unearths the tell-all documents I've been seeking, we'll have to concede that Mary Beverley Carter's progeny did indeed represent strike three.

Not to worry, though, for there are yet three more Carter daughters to review tomorrow in the final inning of this month's project for my Twelve Most Wanted of 2026.

 

Following the Trailblazer: Trust, but Verify

When moving into new territory, it helps to have a trailblazer lead the way. That thought, however, comes with caveats. Is the trailblazer reliable? Someone who deserves our trust? Can the guide's assertions be verified? When following a trailblazer, at least of the genealogical kind, adopt the motto: "Trust, but verify."

Continuing our whirlwind tour of the daughters of John Carter, my fifth great-grandfather, our next child to consider is Sarah. For pursuit of this daughter, our efforts may be hampered by a few factors. The first is that, according to one published book on the Carter genealogy, her mother was reported to be Elizabeth Armistead, of whose marriage to John Carter I haven't yet found any record. The second detail is that Sarah's name didn't appear in a subsequent legal document regarding the Carter children from 1818, suggesting her death prior to that point.

Still, there is much to learn about Sarah Carter. She had married William Sutton sometime before 1780, bearing him several children, three of whom were daughters representing the matriline of one of John Carter's wives. As to that matrilineal founder of Sarah's line, though, the question may be whether it was Elizabeth Armistead or someone else. 

Perhaps fortunate for us—although such a plan doesn't always turn out as neatly as hoped—Sarah's marriage into the Sutton family earned her a spot in one published volume from 1941, The Suttons of Caroline County, Virginia, compiled by Trible Dix Sutton. By virtue of that report—and entries in the book of the generations to follow Sarah Carter—we now have one researcher's idea of how the generations unfolded. The plan, then, is to use this book as a trailblazer and trace Sarah's line, confirming the reports on each subsequent generation through documents available online.

Three details of interest stand out as I begin this process of tracing the line of William Sutton and Sarah Carter. The first is that, from what I've found of Sarah's three daughters so far, she was blessed with at least seven granddaughters—of keen interest to us in this matrilineal project. Secondly, among Sarah's sons was the very relative whose Carter family stories had such an influence on the Joseph Lyon Miller book on the Carter genealogy. The third detail, becoming obvious as I move through the lines of Sarah's grandchildren and beyond, is that the family name "Armistead" appears on a regular basis.

Much as was the case for the first of John Carter's wives, Sarah Kenyon—who, though forgotten in one major Carter genealogy, saw her maiden name echoed in subsequent generations—Sarah Carter Sutton's mother, if she was indeed Elizabeth Armistead as Joseph Lyon Miller asserted, may have been memorialized in the repeated use of the Armistead surname. Of course, this could be attributed to an Armistead ancestor on the Sutton side of the family equation, but it reminds me to keep watching for any further signs of that surname.

For now, with the time remaining for this research project so short, we'll continue tomorrow with another of John Carter's daughters. Behind the scenes, though, I will be confirming the suggested lines of descent of Sarah Carter and William Sutton by linking each individual to supporting documentation. This first project of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 has become far more than could be handled in one short month. We will likely revisit this multi-generation project again in another year.

Not All Daughters Lead to Matrilines

 

It seemed like such a straightforward, streamlined solution: to determine which of John Carter's children belonged to which of his wives, start with the daughters. Then, since my fifth great-grandfather John Carter lived and died in Virginia in the 1700s, trace the descendancy of his many daughters, seeking to focus specifically on the daughters' daughters' daughters, on down to the present time, at which point we could find willing Carter descendants of those matrilines to take a mitochondrial DNA test and help us compare results.

There's a problem with such an approach. Yes, of course, there is that one issue of finding eligible descendants who would be willing to participate in such a DNA project. But that is not the problem which concerns me. Where I'm stuck is this: not all ancestral daughters would eventually lead to matrilines. Somewhere in that long line of generations, John Carter's descendants could experience the exact opposite of what genetic genealogists call "daughtering out."

While I'm still stymied with actually documenting the genealogies of all of John's children, I did find one way to do a quick and dirty assessment of such a situation. I turned to the ThruLines tool at Ancestry to see whether, even at the level of fifth great-granddaughter, my autosomal DNA test could reveal genetic connections to this distant Carter ancestor.

At the level of fifth great-grandparent, that is the most distant level the ThruLines readout will extend. Sure enough, there in my results was an entry for my own DNA matches who join me in linking back to John Carter. 

There were seventeen of those Carter DNA matches. The closest of them shared a puny nineteen centiMorgans with me—an understandable amount, considering the distance of the relationship—and the smallest shared amount registered at only six cMs, hardly a measure generating confidence.

Still, my purpose was to do a quick assessment of my theory that finding matrilines direct from the current generation back to the Carter wives might be a challenge. Looking at the proposed lines according to ThruLines, here is what I found: 

• One match to Mary Beverley Carter, through her son Richard C. Stevens
• Five matches to Margaret Carter (half sister), all through her son Carter Marshall
• Six matches to Sarah Carter (half sister), four through son John Sutton, two through son Norborne Sutton

As you can see, none of those matches came strictly through a matrilineal line of descent, foiling our project's purpose. 

Looking even further, checking the ThruLines entries specifically for the wife of John Carter from whom I'm descended, Hannah Chew, there are a total of fifty nine DNA matches currently entered in this category. For one of them, Carter daughter Judith showed six matches to me, but three come through Judith's son Joseph Sutton, two from son Stephen Sutton, and one more from son John Sutton. Not even among these can I find lines of descent from any of John Carter's granddaughters. I, myself, am such an example, as the matriline leading from Hannah Chew to me stops with my second great-grandfather, Thomas Taliaferro Broyles.

In a general exploration of all of John Carter's grandchildren, I spotted further problems from documentation. Some daughters did have daughters of their own—but of those I've found so far, some died young, or, having survived and married, had only sons. I did find one daughter who had a daughter—but I find no record that she even married, let alone had daughters of her own.

Granted, ThruLines relies on the trees of those who tested their DNA at Ancestry. There can be mistakes. But even the old published genealogies some people rely on contain errors, too. Seeking actual documentation, as we've already discovered, can reveal details not included in some genealogies.

To complicate matters, researching ancestors from the 1700s is far easier when we are looking for ancestral grandfathers than when we are looking for their wives. Women from earlier centuries seemed almost invisible, adding this one challenge to our quest to trace the matrilineal descent of John Carter's wives. Still, if someone doesn't build the tree, we'll never arrive at the answer we're seeking.

A Second Chance at Suttons

 

To say that someone's DNA has survived enough generational recombinations to make it down to our current day is, in my mind, astonishing. I am in awe of what I am discovering about DNA as I look at the strangers whom Ancestry.com asserts are my relatives. This month, my focus has been on the line of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter, a colonial Virginia resident whose children were born in the mid to late 1700s. And yet, distant as that era might have been, something of the Carter DNA is still showing up in my test results.

I've been going through all my Carter matches using Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool this month. Last week, I examined some matches who descend from John and his first wife—in essence, my distant half-cousins—but this week, we'll wrap up with three descendants from John's second wife, Hannah Chew, who was my direct line ancestor. Today, we'll focus on their daughter Judith who, fortunately for us, married a Sutton, giving us a second chance at reviewing two different century-old genealogy books.

Like her half-sister Sarah, Judith's marriage to a Sutton allows us to consult the 1941 genealogy by Trible Dix Sutton, The Suttons of Caroline County, Virginia. Through that book, we learn that Sarah's husband William Sutton was brother of her half-sister Judith's husband Joseph.

According to the Carter genealogy we've been using, that 1912 publication by Joseph Lyon Miller, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford," Judith Carter and Joseph Sutton had two sons and a daughter. The ill-fated daughter, Maria Chew Carter Sutton, married her cousin John Carter Sutton, son of Maria's aunt Sarah and uncle William, and gave birth to a son, John Oliver Sutton, before her untimely death in 1813.

Though I know such unfortunate circumstances befell many women in previous centuries, I tend to remember these tragic details. Thus, when I reviewed the DNA matches descending from Judith's Carter line—of which I have five—it was easy to spot the discrepancy on those matches whose trees declared Judith herself to be the mother of John Oliver Sutton. Three of those five matches, in fact, indicated that that was so. Coupled with that problem, the fourth match indicated a son's name for Judith's child which I cannot find in any records whatsoever. Only one out of the five DNA matches were verifiable by the paper trail.

And yet, how many people do we all know in our current age who, in losing a child, will step into the situation to raise the grandchild? Would that have been the case back in the 1700s? I realize people do copy others' trees, but I don't want to miss any valuable detail. The only recourse at this point would be to research the will for Judith's husband, Joseph Sutton, to see if he made any special provisions for such a grandson as John Oliver.

Conferring with the Sutton book, I noticed the listing for Joseph Sutton's children, unlike in the earlier Carter book, included a fourth child by the aggravatingly similar name of John Orville Sutton. Indeed, checking the book's listing for this John Orville Sutton's children, it included a son whose name had been entered on my Carter DNA matches' line of descent as a son of John Oliver Sutton, Maria's son.

With all the possible confusion generated by such similar middle names, an absolute go-to for this question will be to review the will of Joseph Sutton, grandfather of John Oliver Sutton, and apparently father of John Orville Sutton.

Thus, with this second research approach, I may get a second chance at reviewing that Carter ThruLines readout for all those descendants of Judith Carter who assumed that one Sutton was just the same as another Sutton.  

The Long Steep Slide Downward

 

It's been a long steep slide downward through the generations from my fifth great-grandfather, colonial Virginian John Carter, but I think I've located a Carter DNA match whom I can successfully document. Starting with John himself and his first wife, Mary Elizabeth Armistead, the next step was to their daughter Sarah. She, in turn, married William Sutton and, still in Virginia, became mother of several children.

Fortunately for us, the specific line of descent for my DNA match flowed next to one of Sarah's children with a distinctive name: Norborne Elzy Sutton. Once again, an old genealogy book served as trailblazer for me: Trible Dix Sutton's The Suttons of Caroline County, Virginia. The record there for this particular Norborne Elzy Sutton—yes, there were other relatives also carrying that same name—led me to the son he named after himself, detailing the next generation in this DNA match's lineage.

From that point, we moved from the junior Norborne Sutton to his daughter Alice. It is fortunate to have this outline from a book—which presumably also relied on guidance from family members themselves—for Alice married someone by the unhelpful surname of Clark, not quite as impossible to research as a Smith or a Jones, but still common enough to present a challenge. However, by this point, the search has entered well beyond the pre-1850 stage of hard-to-trace documentation, so that line of descent could more easily be verified by multiple means.

Alice herself, born about 1870, was my DNA match's grandmother, and from that point, the rest of the line fell into place in the family tree fairly easily with documentation. Once that generations-long trail was confirmed, it turned out my DNA match and I are half fifth cousins, once removed—at least on paper.

The half relationship, owing to my descent from John Carter's second wife, augments the distance even more, but just considering the relationship of fifth cousin and beyond makes me almost question how any genetic material can still be there, waving at us, after such a long slide through the generations. The likelihood that no genetic material could be discernible to demonstrate a connection is far greater than the probability that it would be spotted.

Still, surprise or novelty or scientific fluke, this descent through the generations has been an exercise which helped guide me in documenting at least one branch of a family line pointing to that multi-great-grandfather. Silly as it might sound, I feel so connected.

Lost Without Brothers

 

If it weren't for collateral lines, I'm convinced far more of our forebears would bear the label "brick wall ancestors." As I'm exploring the descendants of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter to confirm some DNA matches, tracing the generations of some of his daughters has become challenging. Frankly, I'd be lost on the trail of one of John Carter's great-granddaughters, if it weren't for her brothers—and I'm still having a hard time finding my way.

Women can be hard to trace, especially in earlier centuries when they sometimes were invisible, other than those brief mentions in wedding documents and wills. The research hazard of tracking each change of surname as a woman marries—then becomes widowed, then marries again—makes me realize what a stroke of luck it is to find a widowed woman living in the household of her brother. In some cases, I'd be lost in the genealogical maze if it weren't for brothers.

Take my research project for today—which is stretching into a two-day search. Still checking all my Carter DNA matches via Ancestry's ThruLines tool, I've moved on to John Carter's daughter Sarah. According to the 1912 genealogy by Joseph Lyon Miller which I've been using, this Sarah married a man of Caroline County, Virginia, named William Sutton. Miller also continued in his book with one of the Sutton children, John Carter Sutton, listing this John's children by his second wife, Elizabeth Page Pendleton.

This was fortunate for me. While I realize that any genealogy, no matter whether published online or in a hundred-year-old book, needs to have the details confirmed by documentation, it helps to have a roadmap to get started. Even better, I discovered that this Sutton line into which Sarah had married also had a genealogy published in 1941. Thus, I picked up the same line of Sarah Carter and her husband William Sutton in that book, as well.

As it turns out, I have four DNA matches at Ancestry who descend from Sarah Carter and William Sutton. The highest ranked match follows that same line I just mentioned, from Sarah to her son John Carter Sutton and his second wife, Elizabeth Page Pendleton. And from there, the line turns to a daughter—a hard to trace daughter—Sarah Jane Sutton.

Sarah Jane appears to have married in Caroline County, Virginia, one William Wright. After their 1841 wedding, they remained in her home county, where the 1850 census showed their household growing to include three daughters: Bettie, Margaret, and Sallie. However, by 1860, their growing family—now having added two more daughters—had removed to Mississippi County, Arkansas. If we use that same census as our guide, the Wrights' trail to Arkansas led through Tennessee, where daughter Ida had been born about 1853.

But from there, the line of Sarah Jane seemed to disappear. With a married name as common as Wright added to the popularity of a given name like Sarah, any discovery of where the family moved next could be not much more than a guess. That's when I discovered the helpfulness of knowing who an ancestor's brothers were.

In the 1870 census—though back in Tennessee, not Arkansas—I found a possible Sarah Wright, but no William. There in her household were the familiar names of some of her daughters. However, that household was not actually hers, but the home of a fifty four year old man whose scrawled name looked like E. P. "Sulten." 

There is something to be said for immersing one's self in the full set of ancestral details in any given family. Though the surname may have stumped me, there was something about those initials, E. P. Sure enough, looking back over notes in the Miller book, Sarah Jane's mother's name had been Elizabeth Pendleton—making her initials E. P. And Elizabeth was the only daughter of a man named Edmund Pendleton, again rendering the same two initials. Better yet—and this is why I love tracing those brothers—Sarah Jane had an older brother named after their maternal grandfather. He, too, had moved to Tennessee—the Wrights' stopping place on their way to Arkansas—and set up his home in Haywood County. And in 1870, that's where Sarah Jane and her daughters showed up in the census.

Again in 1880, I found Sarah Jane living with a brother—a different one, and back in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Once again, the miserable handwriting mangled the census readout, but tracing the family history of her brothers helped identify his place in Sarah Jane's family constellation. As I move on to Sarah Jane's specific daughter whose line leads to my DNA match, I've found that same need to check for collateral lines, but in this case, I'm stumped: Sarah Jane had all daughters, whose names changed as they married.

Since confirming DNA matches on ThruLines means I am tracing a family line from an ancestor, while my match did work which began with the present generation and worked backwards, that hope of finding a happy mid-point is not always realized. That means more work ahead.

There are three other DNA matches in this same line of Sarah Carter, daughter of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter, so there are others yet to confirm as well. At this point, I'm just curious to see whether the paper trail can actually yield a verification to a DNA relationship of such distance as theirs.