Morgan met his wife Martha Strode, a Huguenot refugee, on passage to America around 1695.  They married and settled near present-day Reading, Pennsylvania.

As a land speculator, Bryan was in charge of a large-scale colonization project. They moved to near Winchester, Virginia in 1710, and in 1748, with their children, moved to and settled the Yadkin River area of North Carolina.  Bryan purchased several thousand acres of land and divided them amongst his sons. 

Their son William Bryan was born in Frederick County, Virginia in 1734.  He married Mary Boone in about 1755 in North Carolina.  Mary was the daughter of family friend Squire Boone and the sister of Daniel. There were many Boone-Bryan marriages, marking the remarkable bond between the two families for well over a century, including their simultaneous migration to Kentucky.  Daniel Boone married Rebecca Bryan, William’s niece.

William and his nephew John Bryan Jr. accompanied Daniel Boone on his first expedition to Kentucky (then Fincastle County Virginia) in 1773.  The group turned back when Daniel’s son was killed by Indians, a few miles short of the Cumberland Gap.

Samuel Bryan was born to William and Mary (Boone) Bryan in Rowan County, North Carolina in 1756.  He married Mary Hunt in 1775.  She was the daughter of Col. Jonathan Hunt.

In 1777, Samuel, together with George Boone and others, went to Boonesborough Kentucky, under Capt. William Bailey Smith to help ward off an Indian attack.  He would later be a member of the George Rogers Clark expedition.

Samuel brought his family to Bryan Station, Kentucky (current day suburban Lexington) in the spring of 1779.  In the fall of that same year, his father William led a caravan of several hundred people along Boone’s Wilderness Road through to Cumberland Gap, to Bryan Station, Kentucky.

In 1780, Samuel’s father William, and one of his brothers were killed in an ambush while on a hunting expedition near Bryan Station.

No Bryans were still living in the area of Bryan Station during the Tory-Indian siege of 1782.  Most, along with Daniel Boone, had settled in eastern Kentucky.

Samuel Bryan, along with his wife and two of their sons, moved to central Indiana when the Indiana Territory had opened to settlement following the defeat of the Shawnees at Tippecanoe in 1830.