Notes |
- Bryant alleges that in 1797 Lazarus Bryars married an unknown Sizemore of North Carolina. It was not until her death that Bryars left North Carolina. (Most researchers, however, have Bryars haling from South Carolina. None of these claims are sourced nor are they vouched for here.) Since the Sizemores were a well-known Tensaw Creek family and intermarriage was socially advantageous, the question arises whether Bryars took an Indian wife.
The Sizemore family was established in the Tensaw by the late eighteenth century. According to Vickery and Travis, Arthur Sizemore was the progenitor of the Baldwin County Sizemores and haled from from North (others say South) Carolina. If not of mixed ancestry himself, Arthur's presence in the Creek-controlled Tensaw country is explained by his marriage: His wife, Mary "Polly" Bailey, was of European-Creek origin and related to the McGillivrays, Tates, and Moniacs, among others. As Karl Davis explains in The Founding of Tensaw: Kinship, Community, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Creek Nation, the Tensaw community north of Stockton was established by the Creeks sometime after 1783 to facilitate closer contact with Spanish Pensacola (and the the recently relocated British firm, Panton, Leslie). Marriage of Creek women to European men was encouraged as a way to consolidate ties to the south. And with the British loss of the colonies, the Tensaw drew expatriate Tories who were sympathetic to Creek designs in the Gulf.
The Sizemores had ten children but none were contemporaries of Bryars; nor were any married to a Bryars. Mary's will (dated 1860) lists children as follows: 1. Cynthia Padgett; 2. Amelia Stiggins; 3. Celia Colbert; 4. William Sizemore; 5. Absolom Sizemore; 6. Nancy Moniac; 7. Samuel Sizemore; and 8. Betsy Tarvin.
Thus, the question of whether Lazarus Bryars had married into one of the Tensaw Creek families is subject to slim circumstantial evidence. Lazarus endorsed a petition filed by Joseph Stiggins (a back-country trader who had taken a Natchez wife) to allow his children to take oaths. His son, Red Berry, gave his daughter Annie the middle name of Moniac- a well-known Tensaw Creek surname. And a grandson, Frank, married into the Tunstall family for which the Creek heritage is unquestioned. [1, 2]
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