WELCOME TO THE BRADT FAMILY "ARCHIVE"
This website is a collection of the most important and interesting historical documents, letters, books, and articles about the first generation of Bradts in New Netherland. The unfortunate reality is that most of the second and third-hand genealogy that appears on the internet is well-meaning, but wrong. The information that appears on this website is drawn from the research of experienced experts and it has been approved by the leadership of the Bradt Family Society. It comes from the Netherlands, England, New Netherland, and Brazil. None has ever been discovered in Norway.
The Normanskill Falls in Winter
Albert Andriessen "de Noorman" from Fredrikstad, Norway operated mills at this site for so many years that the river came to be known as the Noormans kil (stream). He also leased the surrounding farm.
(For trivia fans, there is a stream in Delaware called the Murder Kill, and New Yorkers are familiar with many kills. "Kil" is an old Dutch word similar to the English word "gill," a creek, rivulet.)
Organization of this Website
In addition to articles about Albert, his page also features his family members and related topics. Ditto for the Arent page.
Connecting the Dots
You can work out a lot about the roots of the Bradt Family just by looking through this website but if you're not familiar with the story, follow some of the links on the "Guestbook and Good Links" page, and in particular be sure to visit The Official Website of the Bradt Family Society.
Some of the family names on this website are spelled in variety of ways. We think of names as having a certain spelling, but that's a fairly recent development. In the 1600s, people spelled names in whatever way made sense at the moment. For example, once or twice Albert spelled his name Aalbert. Many of us thought it was a mistake, but it was a perfectly acceptable Dutch spelling.
When Bad Genealogy Happens to Good People
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What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?
As most of you already know, the internet gives armchair genealogists access to gold mines of family history, some of it very well researched, but most of it wrong or untrustworthy. So how can you tell the difference? That's the $64,000 question.
This website was created to provide a showcase for the very best and authoritative documents about the first generation of Bradts in America, the purpose being to highlight what we know and, just as important, what we don't know. And we know a lot, but sometimes not quite as much as the internet would lead us to believe.
For example, we know a lot about Albert Andriessen Bratt, less about his brother Arent, and nothing at all about the lives of their parents, notwithstanding the internet and a few unsupported Family Group Sheets. We know quite a bit about Albert's wife Annetje, and even the baptismal records of their three oldest children still exist in Amsterdam and in Ilfracombe, England.
The Bradt Family has been very 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 primary sources: government records, church records, gravestones, letters, etc. Most of this research has been done in connection with the Bradt Family Society (BFS).
Publications of the BFS are very reliable. While their researchers have made mistakes just like everyone else, they have been very careful and methodical, and they have done it only to have an accurate record. And the result is outstanding! Much of the content of this website comes directly or indirectly from them.
If you'd like more details about any of these documents, please leave a message in the Guestbook and allow a few days for a response. Thank you and happy browsing.
This pencil drawing of the Bradt sawmill is purely speculative; there is no actual description of the mill. The master millwright in the early years was Dutch, so the original mill did not likely have a Scandinavian appearance, at least until Albert took it over. The original, uncropped version of this drawing shows farmland in the background, just as the map on the "Albert" page shows to be true. The undershot water wheel is also true to the setting. Overshot wheels were unfeasible on this stretch of the 'Noormans kil' because they typically require a dam and a mill pond.
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The idea for this website came indirectly from the Covid pandemic. I was noticing that people with spare time on their hands were posting inaccurate family history on-line, information that had been researched and corrected years ago. Even experienced researchers were leaving old information on their websites, inaccuracies that were directly and indirectly misleading many of our cousins. There wasn't a single website that was correcting common mistakes, or assessing unlikelihoods about our Bratt ancestors. This situation would lead to new generations of researchers wading through masses of misleading family history when they could be doing research with real value. The idea for a website that would showcase the most important of what we know, and the most important of what we don't know, suggested itself. If you find this website half as interesting to browse as I found it to build, it was well worth the effort.
