Page 61 - The Ancestry of Francis Bryan (1770-1863)

I do realize that many very young men, even teenagers, did fight. It was my initial impression that the Bryan brothers named in the Wilmington Hospital list were indeed related to Francis but that they were more likely Francis’ uncles or cousins, not his brothers.
But it is difficult to ignore that these three names show up on the Wilmington Hospital list with two known associates of our Francis Bryan.
Were the John, Thomas and Robert mentioned in the Wilmington Hospital report older brothers, maybe substantially older than the younger three? With a different mother? We know that Francis and Peggy were half siblings, so this is a strong possibility. Then I could believe that these were Francis’ brothers after all. It is also possible that the Thomas Bryan on the list is the father and not the son.
I am not 100% convinced that the Bryant brothers were Loyalists. It is certain that Thomas Blair was a Loyalist. Alexander Sutherland came from Scotland to fight for the British side.
But were the Bryants really Loyalists, or were they Patriot prisoners being cared for at the Loyalist hospital? A third possibility is that they were Quakers who were caught in the cross fire during a battle and taken to Wilmington to be cared for at the hospital.
During the Revolutionary War, Lord Charles Cornwallis and his Loyalist troops were using Wilmington, North Carolina, as one of their three major staging areas. As a port it was a strategic supply base for the invasion of North Carolina. Cornwallis used one of the finer homes in Wilmington as his headquarters. A local church was commandeered to be a hospital for the sick and wounded. This would have been the hospital mentioned in the "Stoppages" report.
There is one Revolutionary war battle in North Carolina in February of 1781 that most likely accounts for the presence of the Bryant brothers, as well as Alexander Sutherland and Thomas Blair, in Wilmington Hospital in April of 1781. That is The Battle of Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781. It interests me for two reasons; It is the last major battle of the Revolutionary War in North Carolina and it is heavily associated with the Quaker community. I believe that there is a strong probability that our surname “Bryans” were originally Quakers.
Our surname "Bryans" were closely associated with Quaker families such as the Boones. I have found DNA matches to other Bryan/Bryant families that were Quakers.
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