Laura Averette Bryan was born on May 2, 1847, in Houston County, Georgia — the tenth child, the last. Her father had died on March 22. She was born approximately six weeks after him, into a house that was still arranging itself around his absence, that had just filed his inventory and appointed her oldest brother administrator of his estate. She was the one thing in that spring that was entirely new.

The estate that her father had left began paying for her schooling before she could read. The returns track her through the years: board and tuition at W.M. Whitehurst's home in Gordon in 1862 — $75, then $25 more in March — four months close to her sister Nancy while the war contracted the distance a child could safely travel. By 1864 she was at Miss M.A. Birch's school, $110 for three months, a fall term of $100. In February 1865 the estate handed her $20 for travel to Wilkinson County — the last of three sisters to make that journey in the months after Sherman had passed through Nancy's plantation. She was seventeen years old.

In the 1866 final distribution of her father's estate, Laura was represented by Robert — the brother who had been administering it since before she was born. She was eighteen years old. Her share: $4,768.06, the same as each of the other four distributees. The estate that had been paying for her shoes and tuition and board for nineteen years settled with her on April 10, 1866.

Before that settlement was signed, Abner went to the Houston County court and adopted her. He was thirty years old. She was eighteen. He had just come home from the war and was about to receive the house and the land. The first thing he did was make himself her legal guardian — the youngest sister who had never known their father, who had spent the war years being kept in school by an estate that understood what she would need.

In the years after the estate closed, Laura farmed her own land and kept her own accounts — the guardianship returns document her transactions in those first years, a young woman who had grown up watching an estate administered and understood what a ledger was for.

She and her sister Catharine P. each married a Stewart brother from Jones County in the years after the war. Laura married Columbus McDonald Stewart on December 9, 1867 — a Jones County man, the brother of Larkin Stewart who had married Catharine P. the previous year. Columbus had served in the Confederate Army. A photograph survives from that period: Columbus seated, Laura standing beside him, both in formal dress. The suit hangs loose on him — the look of a man the war had used hard and not quite returned. He died October 14, 1870, in Kathleen — three years into the marriage, twenty-nine years old. The photograph is the only image in the record. It tells what the documents do not.

Columbus is buried in the Bryan Family Cemetery, four hundred feet south of the house, inside the tall iron fence — beside his brother Larkin, who died two years after him. Both brothers in the cemetery of the family they married into, their wives the last two of James A. Bryan's ten children.

Laura married her second husband, John Tillman Hartley, in 1878. Two daughters: Iza and Sadie. They settled in Fort Valley.

The last document in the estate of James A. Bryan is Laura's Return — filed in 1867, the final accounting of her guardianship under Abner. The estate that had opened in 1847, the year of her birth, closed twenty years later with her name on the last page. She was the first entry and the last. The record that began before she could speak ended with the documentation of her independence.

Laura Bryan Hartley died suddenly on March 23, 1906, in Fort Valley, Georgia. She had been sick a little during the day, but the family did not realize her serious condition until her death — acute indigestion and heart trouble. She was fifty-eight years old. The remains were taken to Kathleen the following Sunday morning for interment in the Bryan Family Cemetery, among the people who had carried her name through the estate record for nineteen years.

The obituary, written by a loving niece, called her the youngest of ten children — six brothers and four sisters. It named the survivors: her husband, two daughters, Aunt Kittie Steadman of Fort Valley, and Uncle Jim Bryan of Kathleen. She was, the niece wrote, a true Christian in word and deed, a devoted wife and mother, a regular and attentive member of her church, a true faithful wife, and a devoted, self-sacrificing mother.