By James Pylant
Project Coordinator
Posted 7 June 2025
The Dudley-Brown DNA Project is for descendants of Samuel George Washington Dudley and his first wife, Elizabeth Brown, who lived in Pike County, Alabama, in the mid-1800s. Over 270 of their descendants have participated in autosomal DNA testing with either Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, or FamilyTreeDNA.
Born about 1811, Samuel George Washington Dudley was a drawer in Georgia’s “Gold Lottery” in 1832. A search of extant Georgia marriage records has not revealed the couple’s wedding date; however, family records identify her as the former Elizabeth Brown. (Some online family trees confuse her with S. G. W. Dudley’s second wife, Elizabeth Hale.) Between 1837 and 1839, the Dudleys left Georgia, moved to Alabama, and settled in Pike County, where they appeared in the 1840 federal census.
The first phase of this project resulted in an article, “Elizabeth, First Wife of Samuel George Washington Dudley of Pike County, Alabama,” which uses available records and DNA testing to reconstruct her family tree. Genetic matching patterns suggest that the Dudleys came from North Carolina. With additional DNA testing and genealogical research, we are getting closer to pinpointing exact ancestral residences.