♂Stephen Bryant

Stephen Bryant (born about 1620) was a colonist of Plymouth Colony who served as constable first of Duxbury and then of Plymouth, and who married Abigail, the daughter of the early settler John Shaw. About 1649 his wife’s brother, John Shaw the younger, sold him a meadow and acknowledged the sale before Captain Standish; the deed calls him “his Brother in law”, the earliest record of the marriage. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through his son John Bryant (born 1650) and his daughter Lydia Bryant (1662–1736).

Early life

His origins in England are not known, and his birth year of about 1620 is an estimate. He first appears at Plymouth in 1643, on the colony’s list of the men able to bear arms, where his name follows those of John Shaw and Shaw’s sons; his name was later struck through, and the list does not say why. On 5 May 1643 Edward Doty sold “Steephen Bryan and John Shawe jun’” two lots of upland, forty acres in all, at the High Cliff, between the lands of Samuel King and Samuel Cutbert.

Marriage and family

He married Abigail Shaw about 1643; the year is an estimate from the arms list and the land purchase, not a date from a register. The meadow that John Shaw the younger sold him had come to Shaw from Mrs. Ann Atwood, and the deed entered in the colony’s records about May 1649 gives Shaw’s own words: “I John Shaw doe acknowlidge that I haue sould all my Right and title that I haue in the meddow ground aboue mencioned to my brother Steuen Bryant”. The captain before whom the sale was acknowledged was Myles Standish, the colony’s military leader, who lived at Duxbury. On 30 January 1663/64 his father-in-law, John Shaw the elder, deeded land near Namassakett to “my son-in-law Stephen Bryant of Plymouth”.

The Plymouth register records six children of Stephen Bryant, born between 1650 and 1665: John on 7 April 1650, Mary on 29 May 1654, Stephen on 2 February 1657/58, Sarah on 28 November 1659, Lydia on 23 October 1662 and Elizabeth on 17 October 1665. The register names only the father; a family genealogy published in 1870 names Abigail as the mother of all of them. A daughter, Abigail, married a John Bryant on 23 November 1665, a man of the same surname but no known relation. The colony’s court later fined Edward Gray “for vseing reviling speeches to John Bryant, the son in law to Steuen Bryant, of Plymouth, on the Lords day, as soone as they came out of the meeting”, an outburst on the Sabbath, at the door of the meeting house.

Public life

On 26 October 1651 he sold William Ford half of eight acres of marsh meadow at Duxbury for £5. He was admitted a freeman of the colony at the court of 6 June 1654, which gave him a vote in its affairs, and the same court named him one of the two constables of Duxbury, with John Aimes.

By 1658 he was back at Plymouth, where on 2 March 1657/58 he took Benjamin Savory, a boy of thirteen, as an apprentice, to teach him to read and write. He was chosen a surveyor of highways in 1658 and again in 1659. In March 1660/61 he sat on the petty jury, which the record calls “the jury of life and death”. In 1662/63 he and Ephraim Tinkham asked the court that “some course might bee taken about some differences amongst theire naighbourhood about the bounds of theire lands”, and the court added William Crow to the men who laid out the town’s land. In 1663 he was chosen constable of Plymouth.

In 1670 he was surveyor of the highways at Plymouth again, and he held the office once more in 1674. In 1676 he served on the grand inquest, the colony’s grand jury. His name is among the Plymouth men on Nathaniel Morton’s list of the colony’s freemen, dated 1683/84.

The date of his death is not known.

Lines of descent

Roger descends from Stephen Bryant and Abigail Shaw by two separate lines, both on his father’s side. The first runs through John Bryant (1650–1736), the son of Stephen Bryant and Abigail Shaw, to his daughter Joanna Bryant (1690–1746). The second runs through Lydia Bryant (1662–1736), the daughter of Stephen Bryant and Abigail Shaw, to her son Samuel Churchill (1688–1751). The two lines meet again in Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797), the daughter of Joanna Bryant and Samuel Churchill, who is Roger’s ancestor through her son James Morton.

Notes

A biographical dictionary of 1887 says that Stephen Bryant was at Plymouth “as early as 1632”, and the 1870 family genealogy carries the same year in its title. The claim rests on those later works alone; the colony’s records first name him in 1643. James Savage’s genealogical dictionary places him at Duxbury in 1643 and at Plymouth from 1650, but the colony’s records put him on the Plymouth list in 1643 and make him constable of Duxbury in 1654. Savage also gives Elizabeth’s birth as 17 October 1660; the register has 1665.

The 1651 sale is recorded in the Plymouth Colony deeds (volume 12, page 216). The apprenticeship of Benjamin Savory is printed in The Mayflower Descendant, volume 12 (1910), pages 133-134, and is dated 2 March 1657/58 in the double-dated form. The 1670 and 1674 surveyor entries and the 1676 grand inquest come from the colony’s records (volumes 5 and 8), where the 1674 entry spells his name “Senir”. The freemen list is dated 1683/84 in the colony’s records (volume 8, page 203).