♀Catharina (surname unknown)

Catharina (living 1813) was the wife of Henry Bradt (died 1813), an early settler of the town of Springfield, Otsego County, New York; when her husband made his will in April 1813, he named her first of his three executors. She was the third great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Leah Bradt (1785–1845), whose place in the family rests on compiled genealogies rather than on a record.

Family

Catharina’s maiden name and parents have not been found, and no record gives her age or birthplace.

The county history of 1878 places Henry at Springfield by 1797, when he was chosen a commissioner of roads at the town’s first meeting. In 1800 the census counted in his household a woman of between twenty-six and forty-four, most likely Catharina, with five boys and five girls under sixteen.

Widowhood

On 5 April 1813 Henry made his will, leaving all his real estate to “my three youngest sons” and appointing Catharine Bradt, James Bratt and Samuel Brate his executors. He died within months. It was Samuel Brate who, as executor, asked the surrogate’s court^W in October 1813 for leave to sell land to pay the debts. When and where Catharina died is not known.

Notes

The 1800 census and the will were read on the original pages; the executor’s petition of 1813 is known from a transcription of the surrogate’s records. The register entries for a child Jacobus at German Flatts in 1783 are known from a published transcription of the register.

No record says that the woman counted in the 1800 household and the Catharine of the will were one woman.

A family journal kept by Bruce Walrod, and records of the Daughters of the American Revolution, call Leah the daughter of “Heinrich Bradt and Catherine Grems”. Grems is a spelling of Krems, the maiden name of the Manheim Henry Bradt’s wife; no record gives it to this Catharina.

Leah Bradt

Leah Bradt, born 28 March 1785, married Johannes Walrath in 1806. No record names her parents. Compilations once made her the daughter of another Henry Bradt (1765–1841) and his wife Catharina Krembs, of Manheim, until that couple’s family Bible, printed in the 1930s in the genealogy column of the Enterprise and News of St. Johnsville, listed their children without her. A correspondent to the same column then wrote that “it looks as if we will have to give Jacobus and Lea Bradt to the Henry Bradt who lived in that part of the town of Canajoharie called Springfield”. The 1930s correspondents also gave this Henry a son Jacobus, born in 1783; the register entries for that child name no residence.

The column took her birth date from the Bible record of a Dr. J. H. Lepper. A history of Springfield, known only through a quotation on a memorial website, says that Heinrich Bradt and his wife were in the town before the Revolution and that their daughter Lea married John Walrod. Her place in this family rests on these compiled accounts alone.