♀Leah Bradt

Leah Bradt (28 March 1785 – 21 September 1845) was a New York-born farm wife who died at Welton, Clinton County, Iowa. She was the great-great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014): her son Nicholas Walrath (1810–1896) was the father of Nicholas Walrath (1850–1895), whose son Clarence Eugene Walrath was Ora’s father.

Family

No record found names Leah’s parents. She is placed, as a compiled conclusion, in the family of Henry Bradt and Catharina of Springfield, Otsego County, New York, on the strength of two compiled accounts. A Henry Bradt was chosen a commissioner of roads at Springfield’s first town meeting in April 1797, and the 1800 census there lists a Henry Bradt aged forty-five or over; his will of 1813 names no daughter. A history of Springfield by Mrs. Douglas Walrath, reprinted in a Walrath family newsletter, says that “Heinrich Bradt and his wife were here before the Revolution” and that their daughter Lea married John Walrod.

A correspondent to a St. Johnsville newspaper’s genealogy column in the 1930s wrote that Jacobus and Lea Bradt would have to be given to the Henry Bradt of Springfield. The 1930s correspondents also gave this Henry a son Jacobus, born in 1783; the register entries for that child name no residence.

Earlier compilations made her instead the daughter of Heinrich Bradt and Catharina Grems (also written Crems, Krems and Kremps), who married at Stone Arabia on 9 August 1788; the statement traces to a Walrod family journal and Daughters of the American Revolution records. It was set aside because Henry Broat’s family Bible, copied in the same newspaper, lists that couple’s children from 1789 (Henry, Catharine, Nancy, John, Mary, Christina and Rebecca) and ends “This completes the list in the Bible.” Leah, born three years before that marriage, is not among them. The earlier statement most likely ran together two couples whose wives were both named Catharine. The surname also appears as Brodt, Bratt and Broat.

A 1942 family history states that she was a relative of Caroline Van Buren Bradt, sister of President Martin Van Buren. The claim cannot stand as written, since Martin Van Buren had no sister named Caroline; his sisters were Dirckie and Jannetje. In 1806 she married Johannes Walrath (1783–1850), probably a son of Nicholas Walrath and Anna Barbara Schultz of the Mohawk Valley. The 1942 family typescript compiled by Walter Bruce Walrod lists eleven children, born between 1806 and 1828: Maria, Lucia, David, Nicholas, Henry, Abraham, Lucinda, John, William, Celinda and Phylinda. Its own summary page gives ten names, but two of them, “John Henry” and “John William”, each merge two children.

Iowa

The family moved west to Clinton County, Iowa, where her husband bought government land six miles north of DeWitt. She died there in September 1845. An account preserved on a Find a Grave memorial, told by her granddaughter Mahala Walrod, places her burial on a knoll about forty rods north-east of the farmhouse, in a family plot on the farm itself. The plot’s fence was later removed and the ground ploughed; by 1942 the family history recorded that “all marks” had been “obliterated.” The same account has her husband buried on the knoll beside her. The 1850 federal mortality schedule records his death in April 1850, of pleurisy; the memorial dates it 1856, and the 1879 History of Clinton County gives 1848. In Iowa the family spelled the name Walrod, while the New York relatives kept Walrath — the surname had already drifted through several spellings since the family’s arrival as Palatine German immigrants, and the records do not explain why the two branches settled on different forms after the move rather than converging on one.

Notes

• Her parentage rests on compiled accounts alone, the history of Springfield quoted on a memorial website and the 1930s newspaper columns, not on a record naming her as a child of Henry and Catharina Bradt of Springfield. The register entries for a child Jacobus at German Flatts in 1783 are known from a published transcription of the register.
• The Bible list is itself a copy: a family Bible transcribed in a 1930s newspaper column from a family member’s copy. The Stone Arabia church register has no entries between about 1770 and 1788, so it can neither show nor exclude a baptism for Leah in 1785.
• Her birth and death dates rest on a Find a Grave memorial. A 1930s newspaper column quoting a Walrod family Bible record gives the same birth date, 28 March 1785, but places her death at Welton in 1840; the Bible has not been seen. A 1943 column in the same newspaper said that her parents had “not as yet” been identified.
• A 1939 typescript of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa family records, compiled by Myrtle Hardenbergh Miller for the Daughters of the American Revolution, has a section on the Walrod family drawn from a family Bible. It gives Leah’s birth as 28 March 1785 and says she and John Walrod married in 1806, with records “from the church at Herkimer, N. Y.” It places their burial about forty rods east of the farm buildings on the DeWitt–Welton highway and says that in 1930 the tombstones from the plot were piled in a barn and the plot was plowed, which agrees with the plot’s loss but differs from the memorial’s north-east. Its Bradt page says she died in 1840, not 1845, so that year now appears in two compiled sources and in no record.
• The same typescript lists ten children, without Maria, and it gives Lucea’s birth as 1808 where the 1942 family history has 1807. Her parentage on its Bradt page repeats the Heinrich Bradt and Catharina Grems statement set aside above, with Leah inserted among the baptisms of that couple’s children. It adds nothing that decides the question.
• How many children she had, and where each lived, is not settled by her husband’s estate papers in Clinton County, Iowa. The probate entries most likely concern him: letters of administration granted to Jacob Lepper on 6 May 1850, an inventory, and a sale order of 3 June 1850. None of them names an heir or a residence.