VERDICT: William G. Bryant--NOT My Ancestor

I started this project to determine if William G. Bryant (1765-1840), son of James and Jane (Guerrant) Bryant of Powhatan County, Virginia, was the same William Bryant who married Barbara Alspaugh on 13 Mar 1799 in Lincoln County, Kentucky. William and Barbara (Alspaugh) Bryant were the parents of my 4x great-grandmother Susannah Bryant who married Edward Windsor Moore. I wrote a series on this couple and the effects of the Civil War on their lives beginning with this post.

Preliminary information suggested these two men were one and the same. William G. Bryant received land from his father in Lincoln County, and appeared on tax lists there around the 1799 marriage date. He was of the right age to be married. However, I will show through several documents left behind by William G. Bryant that he could not have been the husband of Barbara Alspaugh. 

William G. Bryant was born in 1765 in Cumberland County, Virginia to James and Jane (Guerrant) Bryant, descendants of French Huguenots. In 1777, this part of Cumberland became Powhatan County. This birthdate and place information comes from William’s application for a pension for service during the American Revolution. This is an example of the handwriting from the application:

William G. Bryant testifies as to his birth. Click to enlarge.

William’s father James Bryant wrote a will which was entered into probate in Powhatan County, Virginia on 16 Dec 1807 (Book 1, p. 88). In it, he wrote: “Having already given to my son William Bryant a moiety of my lands in the state of Kentucky…”  Moiety means part or portion. The lands referred to are found in the deed books of Lincoln County, Kentucky. The deed was for 260 acres in Lincoln County on the waters of Boone’s Mill Seat Creek, a branch of Dick’s River, and was written in 1793. This is important to help follow the correct William through tax records.

William G. Bryant first appeared in his father’s tax record in Powhatan County in 1784. He was listed by name as age 16-21, and was also taxed the same in 1785. In 1786, however, he was still in his father’s list but age 21 and over, which correlates with his 1765 birth year. He was still in his father’s list in 1787.

1784 Powhatan County, Virginia Tax List
Click to enlarge

In 1788, William and his brother John are found in the tax lists of Lincoln County, which was still a part of Virginia until Kentucky became a state in 1792. John Bryant, born in 1760 and his father’s oldest son, may have been in Lincoln County as early as 1785, when his father gave him power of attorney to act on his behalf to sell land located there.

The easiest way to verify these two were the same would be to find the deed where William sold the land. I believe William and Barbara (Alspaugh) Bryant moved to Orange County, Indiana around 1816, so I thought that would be a good time frame to check. I looked through the entire deed index for Lincoln County, Kentucky and never found the entry for the sale of the Boones Mill Seat Creek land. That was odd, but not much I could do about it. 

I made a timeline for all the facts I had about William Bryant, to help sort out his movements. This helped keep track of where he was, and also showed gaps where I needed to find more information. At this point, I could still believe the two men might be the same person.

However, on a research trip to the Library of Virginia in Richmond, I found a deed that convinced me otherwise.  On 17 July 1811, John Bryant and Mary his wife of Garrard County, Kentucky and William G. Bryant and Mary his wife of Putnam County, Georgia sold any interest they had in their father James Bryant’s land in Powhatan County, Virginia to Peter Dupuy (Powhatan County, Virginia Deed Book 4, pp. 277-278). In 1811, my William and Barbara his wife were still living in Lincoln County, Kentucky with my seven-year-old 4x great-grandmother Susannah. Still trying to make the theory work, I ran through scenarios where William divorced Barbara, or just left her and ran off to Georgia.

Researching in Putnam County, Georgia, I learned that William Bryant had married the widow Mary Flournoy on 26 February 1811. She was the former Mary Ashurst who had married John Francis Flournoy in Goochland County, Virginia on 24 Dec 1787. John Flournoy had died just a year before she married William Bryant. There is much more to tell about this marriage, but I will just note here that a John Flournoy witnessed the 1794 deed in which James Bryant sold the Boon’s Mill Seat Creek land to William.

So, William was married in 1811. But by this time he was 45. Had he been married before? Online trees suggested he had but were mostly unsourced. The FamilySearch family tree had an intriguing set of transcriptions though. They showed that William G. Bryant had a daughter who had been accused and acquitted of murdering her husband, in Alabama of all places. I knew from his pension application that William G. Bryant was living in Marion County, Indiana shortly before he made the application in 1834 from Ripley County, Indiana. This daughter, Ann Minerva Higginbotham, moved to Indianapolis (Marion County) after the acquittal, and William G. Bryant is mentioned in her probate that took place there in 1833.

Research on Ann Minerva Bryant showed she married Caleb Higginbotham in 1812 in Elbert County, Georgia. From this, I estimated she was born around 1791, indicating at least one other wife for William G. Bryant. Online research has not yet uncovered a marriage record. 

I needed to find the deed for when William G. Bryant sold the Boon’s Mill Seat Creek land. If he had a wife alive at the time he sold it, she would have to be mentioned. I went back to Kentucky records. I hadn’t done a thorough workup on the tax records yet, so I started there. The last year I found William in the Lincoln County lists with his acreage on Boon’s Mill was 1796. There were entries for a William after that, but never with the land. I remembered that William’s brother John had moved to Garrard County, so I thought I might check there to see if William followed.

BINGO! They didn’t move at all, the boundaries changed. Garrard County was formed from parts of Lincoln, Madison, and Mercer counties in 1797! 

Once I knew that, it was a snap to find William and his land in Garrard County tax lists. Then in the deed records, I found the sale of the land. On 3 June 1799, William Bryant and his wife Frances sold the land to William Dunn. My ancestor William Bryant married Barbara Alspaugh in Lincoln County, Kentucky on 13 Mar 1799, three months before this deed mentioning a wife named Frances. 

Garrard County, Kentucky Deed Book A, p. 225
Click to enlarge

I still have much to do regarding this family. Since I’ve done all the work to trace William G. Bryant, I’m going to transcribe the documents I’ve found and post them to FamilySearch. I have tried in vain to find a probate that I’m fairly certain exists for him. There is one reference to an "executrix" in his pension file.

I still feel that my William Bryant may be related to this family. There are very few Bryants in Lincoln County in the 1790s, and in 1792 there are two William Bryants listed consecutively. The first is William G.; is the second one my ancestor? Are they connected? Also, Ancestry suggests a few ThruLines that might connect me to James Bryant of Powhatan County, though that far back the segments are very small and could be false.

1792 Tax List Lincoln County, Kentucky
Click to enlarge.