Ittai Bryan
Ittai Bryan was born in Georgia about 1801. His name comes from the Bible. Ittai the Gittite is the captain who stays loyal to King David when Absalom drives the king out of Jerusalem. Few clerks knew it. They wrote him as Ittar, Itar, Itti, Ety, Hetto and Hitto, and spelled his surname Bryan, Bryant, Briant and Byant. Among the descendants of his son Thomas the name was remembered by sound alone, as something like "E-toe".
He was very probably a son of John Bryan, a soldier of the Revolution, and his wife Nancy. John Bryan made his will on 20 October 1825. He left everything to his wife for her life. To "my son Illac Bryan" he left a boy named Abram, held in slavery, and "one equal half of my land in the county of Gwinnett," to be his full share. Illac, or Illai, is how the copy of the will reads, and it is very probably Ittai's name misread in an old hand. Five years later Ittai was farming in Gwinnett County next door to the widow Nancy Bryan.
In June 1829 he was sworn as a juror of the Gwinnett County Inferior Court. The Inferior Court was the county's own bench, which ran roads, taxes, the poor and the estates of the dead. In 1830 the census found Ittar Bryant in Gwinnett, aged between thirty and forty, with a wife in her twenties, one small daughter and one enslaved person. Nancy Bryan, between sixty and seventy, lived next door. In 1832 Georgia gave away the Cherokee Nation's land in the north of the state by public lottery. Ittar Bryan of Loveless's district, Gwinnett County, drew a lot in the 10th district, 3rd section, of Cherokee County. In 1840 Ety Briant was still in Gwinnett, with seven people in his house. Nancy Briant, now between seventy and eighty, lived alone nearby.
His wife was Sarah, born in South Carolina about 1801. Her maiden name is not known. Their children were Rebeccah M., born on 7 November 1827; Thomas Johnson, born on 27 June 1831; Nicholas, born about 1833; Narcissis Elizabeth, born on 19 June 1836; and James Nelson, born between 1840 and 1843. The 1840 household also held a boy of fifteen to twenty whose name is not known. On 11 December 1845 Rebeccah married Charles H. Livsey in DeKalb County, and she lived the rest of her life in the Rockbridge country of Gwinnett.
By 1850 Ittai had moved south into DeKalb County, to the Blackhall district below Atlanta. On 26 October 1850 the assistant marshal wrote him as Hetto Byant, 49, a farmer with land worth a thousand dollars. With him were Sarah, 49, Thos, 20, Nicholas, 16, Elizabeth, 15, and James, 7. Nicholas and Elizabeth had been at school that year. Sarah was marked as unable to read and write. Their neighbours on both sides were Head families from South Carolina, James Head and Richard Head. Nicholas later married Emma Head.
The farm was 202 and a half acres, the whole of land lot 26 in the 14th district. The district had been surveyed as part of Henry County and lay in DeKalb, and from 1853 in the new Fulton County. The tax digests of 1855 to 1869 charge it to Itti, Itai and Ittia Bryan. On 6 May 1855 his daughter Narcissis married William R. P. Thurman in Fulton County. In 1860 Thomas was a merchant boarding at the Atlanta Hotel, and James, fifteen, was in the same house.
The war took both younger sons. James enlisted on 27 February 1862, at seventeen, in Company A of the 9th Battalion of Georgia Artillery, the Leyden Artillery. Nicholas volunteered in the same company at Atlanta on 6 May 1862 and served as a teamster. James was with the army at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, when it surrendered. Narcissis lost her husband in 1862 and was left with four children under seven.
In 1870 the census found Ittar Bryant, 70, still farming, with land worth two thousand dollars and three hundred dollars in personal property. Nicholas lived next door. Sarah had died that March of a bilious fever, at sixty five. Ittai died within the year. In 1871 the farm was taxed as the estate of Ittai Bryan, with N. L. Bryan as agent. In 1872 it was divided among the five children. James took 41 acres. Thomas, Nicholas, Charles H. Livsey for Rebeccah, and John S. Hughes for Narcissis took 40 and a half acres each.
In 1947 a survey of Fulton County burial grounds recorded the Hitto Bryant family cemetery on land lot 26. It lay on the southwest side of the Southern Railway's line from Atlanta to Macon, a short way northwest of the Forest Park Road bridge. A cedar tree marked it, practically on the railroad right of way. Two graves had plain fieldstones without lettering. On the ground lay the top of a tablet that read "In Memory of". The lower part, with the names, was gone. Ittai and Sarah are very probably buried there.
Sources
If Ittai Bryan is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Ittai Bryan (1801-1871)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/ittai-bryan-1801-1871-77ce76.