OUR BRATTS

 

The name Bratt has two meanings. The first is a person who is from Brittany (a Breton). The other -- dweller on a steep place or hillside -- supposedly derives from the Norwegian word Brattr. Some Bratts claim to be descendants of a Norwegian noble family called Bradt. A Norwegian family named Bradt moved to New Amsterdam in the 1600s and changed their name to Bratt. A family spelled Bratt that flourishes today in Sweden traces its Bratt roots back to at least the 16th century. A Norwegian family at Bergen currently uses the same, Bratt, spelling. However it is far from certain that our Bratt ancestors originated in Scandinavia. Indeed the frequency of the name Brett as well as Bratt in Staffordshire suggests the contrary.

 

Whatever their origin, Brittany or Scandinavia, Bratts appeared in history in Staffordshire as early as the 17th century. The first known ancestor was John Bratt who lived from 1675 to 1750 in Little London District, Willenhall, Staffordshire. John married Sarah Kendrick May 8, 1698 in Wolverhampton Parish. In his will his name is spelled Brett. In the marriage registration of his daughter, Elizabeth, the name is spelled Breet.

 

Until about 1840 Willenhall was part of Wolverhampton Parish. Willenhall marriages were recorded as being in Wolverhampton.

           

Like many other Bratts in Willenhall over at least two centuries, John was a locksmith. In those days all locks were handmade. The 1770 Willenhall Directory lists Jonathan Bratt as latch maker, Isaac Bratt padlock maker, John Bratt brass knoblock maker and James Bratt latch maker. An 1856 Directory has similar entries. At one time they called Willenhall Hump City because of the number of men with humps on their back from the gruelling handwork required to produce locks. It is said that Yale locks originated in Willenhall.   

 

John and Sarah had six children. The youngest, William Bratt, married Lydia March. William had inherited a house from his father. At his death he left four houses/properties to his four oldest sons. The youngest of his nine children, Jonah Bratt Sr., a latch maker, born in 1743, received, amongst other things, his father’s church pew.               

 

Jonah Bratt Sr. married Mary Brett who had been married previously. They had six children: Job, Elizabeth, Jonah Jr., Jane, Abraham, and George. They lived at 64 Wednesfield Road, Willenhall, a house still standing in recent times although used as a factory office. A picture of this house appears on the BRATT website: http://128.146.189.6/bratt/jonah_bratt.html

 

Jonah Jr. Bratt married Esther Bratt, a native of the city of London, who in spite of having the same last name is not believed a blood relative of her husband. On the death of her first husband, Esther married his brother George. Her son by the first marriage, Enoch, may not have approved of her second marriage. At any rate when they migrated to America, Enoch’s stepfather settled in the United States while Enoch accompanied his uncle Abraham to Canada.

 

Abraham Bratt was born in the village of Willenhall, Staffordshire in 1778. Before emigrating he was a whitesmith, a finisher or polisher of the metal in lock making. He married Sarah Morgan in Wolverhampton Parish in 1811. The couple had two sons and four daughters one of whom died as a child.

 

The Bratt party to America comprised Abraham and Sarah, their children Harriet, Mary, Samuel, Jonah and Lydia; Enoch and his wife Hannah; together with Abraham's brother George and George’s son Job. George’s wife Esther and two daughters followed in 1839.

 

The Bratt party left Willenhall on April 10th 1834, sailed from Liverpool on April 15th on the ship Oneida, and arrived at New York May 23rd. It is speculated that the party continued up the Hudson River to Albany and then took the Erie Canal, which had opened in 1825, to Buffalo.[1] While the rest of the party proceeded to Indiana, Abraham and Enoch took their families to what was then called Upper Canada, where in July 1834 Abraham bought 200 acres of virgin forest ten miles south of the city of London (Ontario).

 

Abraham's nephew, Martin Bratt, followed on another ship some six years later and settled with others of his family in Indiana. Martin Bratt is the ancestor of Dr. Marvin Bratt, Ohio State University, who is 5th cousin of Robert Harold Murphy and his siblings.

 

Abraham's land was at Concession VI, lot 6 in Westminster Township in what would become Middlesex County. (Concessions were 1.25 miles deep; lots averaged 200 acres.) The nearest post office was or would be Belmont Village. A family anecdote describes Abraham's son Samuel having to walk 40 miles to sell eggs to buy logging chains. Once cleared the land would prove highly productive, as it still is today. 

 

As recently as 1800, permanent settlement by a then handful of Europeans had been restricted to the shores of Lake Erie, some 18 miles away. Those settlers had been driven out during the war with the United States, 1812-15. The government encouraged settlement after the war to deter further encroachment by the United States, and a major influx of people began in the 1820s. Abraham is named in the first census of that region in 1840.

 

The 1842 census shows 10 persons (all natives of England) living in Abraham Bratt's log house as well as one person born in Canada. Living with Abraham are a woman over 45, presumably his wife; two males between 21 and 30, presumably Enoch and Samuel, one boy under 15 thought to be Jonah, two married and two unmarried women under the age of 45, and both a male and female child. It is speculated that in 1842 the wives of both Enoch and Samuel may have lived in the log house of Abraham and Sarah. The other women are thought to be two of Abraham's daughters.  

                       

William and Ann (Oakley) Cooper and their daughter Mary Anne also migrated from Willenhall, Staffordshire in 1834, and we speculate that they may also have sailed the Atlantic with the Bratts. The Coopers settled close to the Bratts on half of Concession VI lot 4. Samuel Bratt is thought to have married Mary Anne Cooper about 1838. The Bratts belonged to the Church of England, the Coopers were Baptists: Samuel and Mary became Wesleyan Methodists, as did their nine children. Samuel may have become a Methodist to take advantage of a land quota granted nonconformist persuasions.

 

In the 1851 census Abraham and his wife lived with the now 24-year-old Jonah Bratt and a 13-year-old, Henry Bratt, born in Canada who may be Enoch's son. (Henry disappears from available documents at the age of 15.)  The census reported Abraham farming 70 acres, Enoch 30: however the land may have been farmed jointly. Of particular interest, in the same year, 1851, Abraham's son Samuel Bratt farmed 166 acres at concession VI lots 4 and 6 or parts thereof. The main crop grown was wheat. Samuel's livestock included two bulls or oxen, five milk cows, four calves, three horses and 49 pigs. Living in a log house with Samuel at that time were Mary Ann, his wife, and children Jessie 12, Harriet 10, William 8, Rhoda 5, Sarah 3 and Phoebe just born. The first three children were attending school. 

 

The agriculture census of 1861 shows Samuel Bratt farming parts of lots 5 and 6, a total of 220 acres of which 130 were under cultivation. The cash value of the farm was put at $7,700 a figure double or triple that of surrounding farms. Samuel owned 21 steers or heifers, 7 milk cows, 4 horses, 56 sheep and 19 pigs. Jonah Bratt was married with several children and was farming 50 acres on lot 4. Enoch had taken up residence elsewhere in the same township.

 

An 1865 newspaper records Samuel Bratt as "judge of swine" at the Westminster annual fair.    

 

A land index shows that Samuel Bratt obtained ownership of lot 7 concession VI in 1862. The Land Atlas of 1878 shows Samuel Bratt on lots 5 and 6, and his son Jesse in possession of lot 7. Indeed, Land Registry Archives show Samuel and his wife bought, sold, mortgaged, and foreclosed many pieces of land in both Westminster and North Dorchester Townships. Amongst his dealings Samuel sold land and provided a mortgage to the Methodist Church.

 

Sarah Bratt died in 1866, her husband Abraham in 1871. Their graves are reportedly in the Derwent Cemetery near where they first settled.

 

The Derwent or 5th concession burial ground, near Belmont, saw its first burial in 1840 and its last in 1950. As early as 1932 the county cemetery board reported that Derwent had 400 graves but no records of whose they were, and that the cemetery's condition was "bad". It subsequently fell into ruin and was overrun by lilac bushes and undergrowth. Some gravestones cracked and crumbled. Others became illegible. The cemetery was restored beginning in 1980, but the surviving stones are now grouped on concrete platforms and no longer stand over the original graves. No trace remains of the first two Bratts buried there.

 

By 1871 Jonah was farming in West Williams Township in the same county and had nine children. Several of his children were subsequently married and buried at the village/town of Parkhill, located in the northwest corner of Middlesex County. 

 

The 1881 census shows three of Samuel's children still living at home, Eliza 29, Tirzah 24, and George Alfred Bratt 22. The same census reveals that Samuel's eldest son, Jesse Bratt, now had seven children. Curiously, not far from Samuel's farm lived another farmer named Samuel Bratt aged 32 with five children one of whom was also named Samuel. The relationship of the first and second Samuel Bratt is unknown. 

 

Our Samuel Bratt died in 1885. In his will Samuel left: the north half of VI lot 7 to Jesse Bratt; VI lot 6 to George Alfred Bratt (subject to conditions which in effect provided his mother with a lifetime income); ten acres in North Dorchester to both the sons above; a house-sized lot to his wife, to be left by her to daughters Tirzah and Eliza; his household furniture to his wife, to be left to Eliza on his wife's death; two house lots to the executors of his will, namely Jesse Bratt, George Alfred Bratt, and Henry Jackson, who were to dispose of the land and other financial assets in ten years in order to provide legacies of $500 to each of his daughters Harriet Carrothers, Rhoda Jackson, Sarah Ann Jackson and Mary Jane Abbott, and $1,000 to Eliza and Tirzah.

 

Samuel's wife, Mary Anne, lived to the age of 94, dying in London, Ontario on July 2nd 1911. In her will she made her daughter Tirzah McElheran administrator. She left Mildred, daughter of George Alfred Bratt, $100. Alfred, son of Tirzah, got $100. George got $500 for himself. Finally, she left the quarter of VI lot 5, which she had owned for some years, to Tirzah.

 

 

Two of Samuel's daughters married Jacksons. Rhoda Jodie Bratt married Joseph Jackson in 1866. Sarah Ann Bratt married Joseph's brother Henry in 1869, and subsequently had nine children in North Dorchester Township.

 

Rhoda gave birth to eight children while living on Joseph's farm/ranch (he thought of himself as a livestock man) in Middlesex County's North Dorchester Township and two more after relocating to Regina, North West Territory in 1881. While still living in Regina, she and her husband adopted an eleventh child, a grandson, Lloyd. After twenty years on the Prairies, Rhoda, her husband and the younger children moved in 1901 to Nelson, British Columbia where she and Joseph lived out their final years. However Rhoda enjoyed at least one lengthy trip back to visit friends and relatives in Ontario.

 

Rhoda's brother Jesse moved his family to the North West Territory in 1889. He obtained land given up by an original homesteader some 20 miles south of Regina near a body of water called at first Buck Lake, then Bratt Lake. Jesse's descendants, one of whom (1997) was called Jesse Bratt, still operate farms in the area[2]. The nearby body of water is still called Bratt Lake.   

 

 Samuel and Mary Anne Bratt are buried in Derwent Cemetery, Westminster Township as is their son William and a child of unknown parentage, Eva Alberta Bratt. Enoch, Hannah and Sarah Ann Bratt are buried a few miles away in Dorchester Union Cemetery. George A Bratt, Samuel's son, is buried at Woodstock in adjacent Oxford County. The ten Bratt graves identified in Woodstock indicate that a branch of the family (according to a cemetery worker one or more may be teachers) continues there. Jesse (who actually died in Victoria, BC) and his wife Rachel are buried "out west" in the Bratt (Buck) Lake Cemetery, in Saskatchewan, which is located on land originally donated by Jesse himself. Jonah Bratt lived for many years near Parkhill, Ontario but died in the USA. His grave has not been found, although his wife Mary Ann is buried as are several of his children at Parkhill Union Cemetery. Rhoda Jodie Bratt and her husband Joseph are buried "in the far west" in Nelson's Memorial Park.

 

Another Bratt from England, Joseph (1794-1883), migrated to Upper Canada in 1842, and settled in Essex County, near today's city of Windsor. A number of Bratts continue to live in that county. The ancestors of Joseph have been traced to the town of Church Eaton, Staffordshire that is only a few miles from Willenhall, however the connection between Joseph and Abraham has yet to be made.            

 

Sources: Canada census - 1840 to 1891; Ontario Land Index; Land Atlas 1878; cemetery records of Middlesex and Oxford Counties, ON and Nelson, BC; probate archives of Middlesex County and wills of Samuel and Mary Anne Bratt held by Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario; Ontario Land Registry Archives; parish records of Willenhall provided by LDS family centre, and (with other data) Dr. Marvin Bratt http://128.146.189.6/Bratt_genealogy99/index.htm ; files of London Free Press and Nelson Daily News; Marjorie and Neil Bratt; 1948 letter from Lucy Hannah Jackson to her grandson Harold; Sharon Delle Coste dcoste@ozemail.com.au ; 1997 gravestone photos by Harold Murphy.                                                    

 

Update 9 April 2001

 


[1] A popular route for immigrants to Ontario during the 1830s.

[2] Email of 26 March 2001. “I was surfing the net when I came across your note re the Bratt family history. My name is Glenn Bratt and I farm at Bratt Lake which is 18 miles south of Regina or 12 miles straight north of Milestone. My great-great-grandfather was Jesse Bratt who was a brother to Rhoda Bratt. I am presently residing in Regina with my wife and two children and drive to the farm nearly every day. There are 5 descendants of Jesse Bratt still involved in farming at Bratt (Buck) Lake.”