Bryan County Deed Records

The They Had Names website is normally dedicated to Liberty County records. However, Bryan County neighbors Liberty County and throughout its history, there has been overlap in the population. Some people enslaved in Bryan County wound up in Liberty County, and vice versa. While Liberty County is rich in antebellum records, most antebellum records for Bryan County no longer exist. 

The shining exception is the Bryan County Superior Court deed records, which name enslaved people in bills of sale, deeds of gift, marriage settlements, chattel mortgages, and occasionally estate inventories and wills. These records can be found on both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. I am reading through all these deed records starting from 1795 through 1865 (Deed Books A-G), and adding abstracts of any deeds that name enslaved people. You can find the abstracts I have created so far below. 

Because this site does mainly focus on Liberty County, you need to use a different search technique to find a name in only Bryan County records. To find the name “Flora,” for example, in the Bryan County deed records (and ignore the references in Liberty County), use this search term: Flora “Bryan County”. Be sure to put the quotation marks around “Bryan County.” Otherwise, the search will pull any records that have both Bryan and County in them, not just the ones with Bryan County. 

If you are researching Bryan County, you may also be interested in other deed records, which are mostly about land. In 1929, Caroline P. Wilson created abstracts for Deed Books A-D for the Lachlan McIntosh Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution Savannah. These abstracts are now on the Genealogy Trails page for Bryan County. Unfortunately, they do not give page numbers (and mostly do not name enslaved people) but are very useful for identifying that a deed of interest to you does exist.