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Bryan Lineage from England to Waveland courtesy of Waveland State Historic Site
It is in Tudor England that the earliest Bryans are found by means of an un broken line of records. The most conspicuous Bryan of this time is Sir Francis I, a favorite of King Henry VIII and a cousin to Catherine Howard and Anne Boleyn, both Queens of England. He was the only son of Sir Thomas Bryan and grandson of Baron Bryan who held office under the Crown in 1471. Sir Francis married twice. After his first wife died, he married Joan, Countess Dowager of Ormonde, Ireland in 1548. They had a son, Francis II, born in 1549.
Frances II married Ann, daughter of Sir William Smith, and they had a son, William Smith Bryan born in 1590 in County Clare, Ireland. William Smith Bryan was known as Prince William. During the Puritan Rebellion, he attempted to gain the throne of Ireland, but the Cromwellian government put him on board a ship and deported him to Gloucester Beach, Virginia in 1650. He had eleven children with Catherine Morgan, the eldest being Francis III. William died in Virginia in 1667.
Francis III returned to Ireland about 1667 and attempted to regain his hereditary titles and estates. He was not accepted and was forced to flee the county. He went to Denmark where he married Sara Brinker, a cousin to William, Prince of Orange, later William III of England. Francis III was permitted to return to Ireland after the bloodless revolution of 1683 and died in Belfast in 1694.
Francis III’s son Morgan Bryan was born in Denmark in
1671. He returned to America sometime before 1719. He settled first in Reading,
Pennsylvania. There he married Martha Strode. They later moved to Winchester,
Virginia. Martha died in 1747 and Morgan then moved to North Carolina where he
died Eastern Sunday, April 3, 1763 at the age of 92.
It was thee of Morgan’s sons - James, Morgan Jr, and William, who left with Daniel Boone (at right) in September 1773 to settle along the Kentucky River. Their niece, Rebecca (their brother Joseph’s daughter), had married Daniel Boone and their sister Martha had married Daniel Boone’s brother Edward. And to tie the families together a third way, William Bryan married Daniel Boone’s sister Mary. In 1774, Daniel Boone worked with Colonel Richard Henderson to gain possession of the Cherokee lands bounded by the Ohio, Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers. They purchased this land and Boone was hired to take possession of it. He raised a company of men and proceeded to blaze a trail to the Kentucky River. At the point where Otter Creek flowed into the Kentucky River, they built a stockade and in honor of Daniel Boone, called it Boonesboro. The stockade was finished by June.
In the spring of 1779, Daniel Bryan (at left), along with his father William and
brother Samuel came to Kentucky to erect a fort on the north fork of Elkhorn
Creek in Fayette County. They then returned to the Yadkin River valley and in
the fall of that year, the Bryans, in party with Daniel Boone and his family,
returned to Kentucky. The Bryans, and many of their neighbors, settled at
Bryan’s Station.
It is known that in 1779 and 1780, William, James , Joseph, Morgan Jr, Samuel and John Bryan all entered land in tracts lying some distance from the stockade at Bryan Station. They entered 13,000 acres thinking the land belonged them. The land on which the fort was built and a thousand acres surrounding it had been entered by a Colonel Preston of Virginia. That winter was a difficult one and by spring the men were having to travel farther out to get game. It was on one such expedition, that a hunting party led by William Bryan was attacked by Indians at Great Crossing in present day Scott County and William was mortally wounded. William was a much respected leader, so the Bryans, already disheartened by the news that the land did not belong to them, decided to return to North Carolina.
Although the Bryans moved back to the area a few years
later, they never again occupied Bryan’s Station. It was this last migration
that brings our Bryans to Waveland. Daniel Bryan (who had no middle name,
despite modern references to Daniel "Boone" Bryan) was given a land grant for
services in the Revolution. This grant was for 400 acres, and it is believed
that he received his father’s grants for 1000 acres as well. A portion of that
land had originally been surveyed by James Douglas in 1774 for Alexander McKee,
but because McKee had been a British sympathizer and had led a band of
Indians against the Kentuckians during the Revolution, his lands were
confiscated by Virginia and redistributed.
Daniel Bryan settled on the granted land in the 1790s, building a house near Providence Station (present day Brannon in Jessamine County). Daniel’s son Joseph (at right) was born on the farm in 1797 and acquired enough of his father’s land to farm when he was married to Margaret Cartmell in 1822. By the time Waveland was begun in the fall of 1844 (according to a letter written by Elijah Bryan in 1845), Joseph owned 1061 acres around the house.
When Joseph died in 1887, the house and 200 acres was willed to Joseph Henry Bryan, Joseph’s youngest son. Joseph Henry probably moved back into Waveland when Joseph moved to South Broadway in 1877. Joseph Henry sold the house at auction in 1894. The Bryan family moved into Lexington, where their descendants still live today.