Catharine Penelope Bryan was born on Christmas Day, 1837, in Perry, Houston County, Georgia — the seventh child, the second daughter. Her father died in March 1847 when she was nine years old. Six months later her name appeared in the estate return: one of five Bryan children enrolled in school, their tuition paid from the cotton ledger Robert had taken over at twenty. The estate did not pause. Catharine P. was in school that fall alongside Cornelius, Nancy, Abner, and James S.

The returns track her through the school years — I.K. Nance's school in 1847 and 1848, Harvey's school in December 1849, Hammer's school in 1850. Her books that December included a Webster's Spelling Book and a dictionary. In August 1849 the estate purchased shoes for her at Smith & Jayne — $1.50. The ledger notes these things without commentary. A child growing up in a plantation house whose father's estate was still being administered, still buying her shoes.

In the war years Catharine P. appears in the record making purchases in Macon on estate business — the returns note her conducting transactions in the city as the plantation's commercial life contracted around the war economy. The Lynton Book places her going to Macon for supplies during the war, the practical work of keeping a household running when the supply lines from the city had become uncertain and expensive.

In January 1865, the estate handed her $20 for travel to Wilkinson County. Her sister Nancy lived in Gordon, on a plantation that lay in the path of Sherman's march. Sherman's officers had made their headquarters there the previous November. When the columns moved on, the plantation was left desolate. Honora had traveled to Wilkinson in June 1864 — before. Catharine P. traveled in January 1865 — after. Laura followed in February. Three sisters making the same journey in the same year, the ledger recording the travel expense without recording what they found when they arrived.

She is one of five distributees in the 1866 final distribution of her father's estate — signed into the record as Kitty Stewart, now married. Nineteen years after James A. Bryan's death, the administration Robert had carried since 1847 was closed. The estate appraised at $23,840.30. Each distributee received $4,768.06. Catharine P. — Kitty — signed for her share.

She and her sister Laura had each married a Stewart brother from Jones County — two sisters, two soldiers, the kind of pairing that Houston County produced when the men came home and the families sorted themselves back into order. The match with Larkin Stewart brought six children. Larkin died October 15, 1872, in Houston County, and is buried in the Bryan Family Cemetery, four hundred feet south of the house she grew up in, inside the tall iron fence. Laura's husband Columbus McDonald Stewart died October 14, 1870, and is buried there as well — the two brothers, in the cemetery of the family they married into.

Widowed in 1872, Catharine P. married her second husband, Dr. Elliott Vincent Steadman, and settled in Fort Valley. One son, H. Bryan Steadman, born 1878. She carried the name Kitty through the reunions — in the 1907 newspaper notice she is Aunt Kitty — the older cousin who had come through it all firsthand and kept the family's stories alive into the new century.

In July of 1907 the Houston County newspaper recorded a house party at Dr. and Mrs. E.V. Steadman's home in Fort Valley, with Lynda Lee Bryan among the guests. It is the last documented moment the record places the two women in the same room.

Catharine Penelope Bryan died April 21, 1919, in Fort Valley, Georgia. She was eighty-one years old. She had been born Christmas Day. She outlived her father, her mother, all nine of her siblings, and her first husband. She is buried beside Elliott Steadman in Fort Valley.

She was the longest-lived of the ten children of James A. and Catharine H. Bryan. Born in 1837, she died in 1919 — she saw emancipation, Reconstruction, the Spanish-American War, and the year after the Armistice. The war that took her brother Troup, widowed her sister Laura, sent Abner away with $7.50, and left Nancy's plantation desolate was something she had lived through in the middle of her life. She traveled to the wreckage. She came back. She kept going.

Larkin and Columbus Stewart were brothers from Jones County, Georgia. Their mother was Dr. Palacia Harrison "Pallie" Wilson Stewart, born 1805 in Gray, Jones County — the first female licensed physician in Georgia. She died in Clinton, Jones County, in July of 1866, the same year the Bryan estate was finally settled. It is said she treated soldiers on both sides of the War.