Page 45 - The Ancestry of Francis Bryan (1770-1863)

I think this is the first attempt to make this William to be Morgan's brother (which recently has been disproved by DNA testing, I understand).
J. W. Shearer, The Shearer-Akers Family_(Somerville, N.J., 1915), p. 11, pretty much copies the previous genealogy, but now William (b. 1685) becomes unquestionably the son of "Francis (?) Bryan."
Zella Armstrong, Notable Southern Families_(Chattanooga, 1922), 2: 33-34, repeats the Mackenzie sketch, but cites "one authority" who makes William Smith Bryan's arrival in Virginia at 1615, and further that there were 29 sons and grandsons who took up land in Virginia. It also says that William Smith Bryan was the ancestor of the Irish peer Lord Ichquin [sic, Inchiquin] and the Irish politician William Smith O'Brien. This article makes a guess that James Bryan, of Isle of Wight County, Virginia, and his brother William (father of Needham) were sons of "William Smith Bryan." The rest of the article introduces a lot of dates without sources, but nothing seems outlandish.
Ella H. Atterbury Spraker, "The Boone Family" (Rutland, Vt., 1922), fortunately takes the above accounts more critically. Other accounts, like William B. Curd, The Curd and Allied Families (Madison, Wisconsin,1927), copy this early stuff without question.
Edward Bryan published several articles and deserves much of the blame for making these inherently dubious sources look factual. In "Bryan, a Pioneer Family," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 40, no. 132 (July 1942), he goes into Sir Francis Bryan and his family, and credits the above articles, as well as various genealogists. He makes Sir Francis Bryan (who in fact had no issue) the father of one son, Francis, who married "Ann, daughter of Sir William Smith," and had William Smith Bryan, the alleged Virginia immigrant, who, incidentally, was "among the first to bring horses to America," for which he cites an unnamed article in "The Thoroughbred Record" (!).
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