Page 86 - The Ancestry of Francis Bryan (1770-1863)

This was about 1786, and they had lived there about six years when Francis BRYAN, from Orange county, in 1793, located within five miles of them."
Dr. A.B. Cox states in Footprints in the Sands of Time (1900), Ch. VI: "Francis BRYAN came to Alleghany County from Elk Creek, Va., but was originally from the eastern part of the state. He married Miss Phebe Woodruff and settled in the southeastern part of the county on the road leading from Grayson Old Town to Traphill, Wilkes County, where he and family lived to a good old age."
Similarly, B.F. Nuckolls writes in Pioneer Settlers of Grayson County Virginia (1914), Ch. VIII:
"In the early settlement of Southwest Virginia, Francis Bryan and his sister, Elizabeth Bryan, came to Fort Chiswell and the Lead Mines; from there they crossed the Iron Mountain and settled on Elk Creek. Elizabeth Bryan married John Sutherland, Sr., and brought up a family of sons and daughters. Francis Bryan married Phoebe Woodruff, and moved from Elk Creek to Ashe county, North Carolina."
In a key passage, Nuckolls claims that Francis Bryan was related to the great 19th century statesman William Jennings Bryan. Nuckolls cites a family history of William Jennings Bryan:
"In the history of the Bryan family, written by the wife of William Jennings Bryan, she states, 'The great grandfather of William Jennings Bryan had a brother, Francis Bryan, and a sister, Elizabeth Bryan, that moved west from Eastern Virginia, and the family has lost trace of them.'"
In his autobiography The First Battle (1896) p.33, William Jennings Bryan wrote that his great-grandfather William Bryan lived in Culpeper County, VA, and had five children: "James, who removed to Kentucky; John, who remained upon the
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