Welcome to the Official Website of the Bradt Family Society.  Give it a good look-over, and be sure to sign our guestbook before you leave. For questions about your Bradt ancestory, "The Bradt Family News," or to contact our historian, officers, and other volunteers, please refer to the list of names and e-mail addresses listed near the bottom of our Home Page. Now that you've found us, keep in touch.  If you're interested in joining the Bradt Family Society, the membership includes a subscription to the Bradt Family News (BFN), which is published twice a year.  The dues ($10 a year) pay for the cost of printing the BFN, postage, and this website. If you would like to take an active part in our organization, even better.  Just send me an e-mail at brottfam@gmail.com .  Let us know what kind of family research you're doing, send an article for the Bradt Family News, come to our reunion, volunteer for office, or just say hello. Our membership is currently about 300, plus spouses and children.  Most of us had no knowledge of our family origins until the 1987 Reunion was publicized.  We usually guessed that we might be German (the Bradts and the Brotts), English (the Bratts), or Dutch (the Vanderzees).  Ethnic celebrations left us out, because we'd lost track of our roots. Now we know that we're a part of a great heritage that built two nations, Canada and the U.S.  With your active membership, we will continue to uncover this heritage and to pass it on to upcoming generations.          --Steve Brott, Webmaster

HELP! INFORMATION OVERLOAD or Where Can I Find Reliable Family History? Those of you who have used the internet to explore your family tree have quickly discovered what an overwhelming amount of information is available in cyberspace. You may have also discovered how contradictory a lot of it is. So how can anyone tell which information is correct, which is probable, which is only speculative, and which is downright mistaken? The Bradt Family Society has been fortunate in having several cousins and friends who have been very thorough in researching our roots.  What this means is that they go back to "original sources": government records, church records, gravestones, letters, etc. Newspapers and other contemporary written sources are helpful in filling in the gaps (although newspeople don't always get it right.) Oral tradition can be helpful in deciding what to research.  A personal example comes from my grandfather's experience.  As a young man around the year 1900, he signed his name "Brot" for a while, believing it was the original spelling of our name. His grandfather, who was born into a family that used the Bradt spelling, had told him that Brott was originally spelled with just one T.  True enough, Bradt only has one T, but obviously something got lost in the translation. The moral of the story is to use oral history as the beginning of research, not the end. I stick very close to the official Bradt Family versions of our history, because I have come to know quite a bit about the people who have done the research. While they make mistakes like everyone else, they have been very thorough and methodical, and they have done it only to have an accurate record. They've never attempted to make any money from it. If you'd like to verify questionable information about the history of the Bradt Family, start with our officers and in particular with our historian, Daniel Bradt.  He has access to the research and publications of Cynthia Brott Biasca (now retired), Peter Christoph, Stefan Bielinski, Joan Bradt Wood, Laurie Grimes, and more. You'll never go far wrong with any of these sources, and some of their books are probably available through inter-library loans.  And what we tell you is free! But don't stop there. There may be original sources in the old countries (Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and possibly Sweden) waiting to be discovered. (The Mormons (LDS) have photographed many records from the European countries and made them available to the general public for a very small fee.  How good is your Norwegian?)  There are undoubtably sources in New York State that have not been uncovered.  And of course, our more recent history has been lived out all around the world.

Invitation to the 1987 Bradt Family Reunion Where? Albany, New York Why? To celebrate our 350th Anniversary That’s right: 350 years (now 370 years). It was on August 26, 1636, that Albert Andriesse (Bratt), originally of Fredrikstad, Norway, signed an agreement in Amsterdam, Holland, with the Dutch patroon, Kilian Van Rensselaer, to come to the New World. On October 8, he and his wife, Annetje Barents, two children, and probably also his brother Arent, set sail from Holland on the "Rensselaerswyck". On November 2, the ship’s log records the birth of a third child, in the midst of heavy weather and very high seas. Baptized "Storm" and later known as Storm van der Zee ("Storm from the sea"), his offspring took on "Vanderzee" as their last name. After some time in port in England to repair the damage caused by the storm, they set out again across the Atlantic, arriving in New Amsterdam (New York) on March 4, 1637. They proceeded up the Hudson River to Rensselaerswyck (Albany), where Albert set about the operation of "two large sawmills", run by a "powerful waterfall". This was on a creek which the Dutch, who referred to the Norwegian as "De Noorman", called the "Normanskill" (Northman’s creek). Albert, an energetic and sometimes irascible character, soon split with his partners (and) started growing tobacco (Something he apparently learned in Holland).  Several years later he assumed sole responsibility for the sawmills, acquired property on Manhattan Island, and developed a close business relationship with one of his former partners. Van Rensselaer, who could be difficult in his own right, frequently had bones to pick with many of his tenants, including Albert. But at the death of Jeremias van Rensselaer, director of Rensselaerswyck and grandson of the first patroon, Albert was invited to the funeral. In his personal life, Albert prospered, raised a large family, and married two other women after Annetje died (the first being the widow of his other partner in the sawmill). However he was not at home in the Dutch Reformed Church and was eventually dragged into court for the heresy of organizing and conducting Lutheran religious services in his house. (After the English takeover, the other denominations in the colony were granted freedom of public worship.) Albert survived to be cited in his obituary in 1686 as one of the oldest inhabitants of the colony. Still, according to contemporary historian Stefan Bielinski, it took the customary three generations before the Bradt "foreigners" were fully accepted into Dutch Albany society. Brother Arent, meanwhile, had become one of the founders of Schenectady. (Most of) His offspring survived the Indian massacre of 1690, and have played a prominent role in the life of that city ever since. One of them, Jannetje Bradt, gave birth to a future governor of New York, Joseph C. Yates, 1823-25. …I didn’t (know any of this) until a few years ago when I started poking into the family history and corresponding with other Bradts. One of the surprising things I learned is that with only a few exceptions (e.g., the descendants of Morris Bradt who came from Germany in the 1850s), all persons in North America today of the spelling "Bradt", as well as many Bratts, Brotts, Brodts, and Vanderzees, descended from Albert or Arent. Over the years, the Bradts have occupied every station in life, from the poor house to Who’s Who, from pillar of the community to the average Joe. The entrepreneurs among them have headed every type of organization, from the Maytag Corporation, to a biscuit manufacturer, to the corner tavern (e.g., Isaac Bradt’s 1880s establishment on Green Street in Albany.) Some of us who have been swapping these tales for years have often said how much fun it would be to have a grand national get-together, where we could share these stories and learn more about how the Bratts have contributed to the great national drama(s), Canadian and U.S. With the 350th anniversary as incentive, we are about to make it happen... --Ken Bradt, from the invitation letter mailed to phone book-listed Bratts (of several spellings) in 1986.  My thanks to Ken for permission to use this.        -the webmaster. ************************************* (For some of us, this letter was the first clue to our roots.  My first thought was to throw it in the trash with the junk mail.  But this letter was different: it contained specifics that jibed with things my grandfather had told me.  We followed up and learned that our line was documented all the way down from Albert and Annetje.) The 1987 Reunion was attended by more than 300 people.  The enthusiasm that it generated "led to the organzation of the Bradt Family Society, the publication of six books and a newsletter, establishment of a website, a visit to ancestral sites in Europe, and a repeat of our international reunion every five years." ************************************* To contact the webmaster, our genealogist, membership secretary, or one of the other Bradt Family Society Officers, use the e-mail addresses near the bottom of the home page.

Assistant Webmaster SamanthaJean(Sammy) Brott, a One Dog Wrecking Crew Sammy is the sister of Lisa and Bobby, and the daughter of Margie and Steve.  (Very few people in this world are as privileged as this dog.)