Those who belong to the Australian Brandstater tradition don’t know much about Albert Brandstater. Yet what we do know reveals him as an upstanding , talented young man who pursued higher education in America. He married a loyal American wife, and after a limited return to life in Tasmania, he adopted the United States as his permanent home where he developed a successful professional career.  

Some uncertainties surround Albert’s early beginning. He was the first child born to Emanuel and Carolina Brandstater after their arrival in Tasmania in 1872. This island was still a British Crown Colony and therefore, although a native Tasmanian, Albert was a British subject. He could claim Australian citizenship only later, after the six separate colonies came together and formed the new country of Australia in 1901.

There is a question about Albert’s legal birth name, though official records in Tasmania would surely settle the matter. All of us in the Australian family have always referred to him as Albert. But we discovered much later that in California his American family knew and remember him as Charles, an alternative name that surprised us. In this history we will call him Albert, leaving the name Charles to the later, youngest son of the First Family. We have consistently known this younger brother as Uncle Charlie.

These early uncles were a precious connection between our era and those first settlement years. When I (Bernard) was a schoolboy in Sydney I did have some acquaintance with our great uncles, who were members of the First Family and who had sailed together and arrived in Hobart 1872. The ones I knew were Gustav Adolph (Uncle Arthur) and Herman. But life turned out differently for young Albert. We have a good photo of Albert as a young man, taken before his departure to Battle Creek. But after his abbreviated sawmill enterprise with his brother Emanuel Jr, we lost contact with him. We saw no more of him until the late 1930s, when he and his son Kenneth visited Sydney harbor, as part of a Pacific Ocean cruise. I remember well the Brandstater family reunion we enjoyed on that day, when a group of family members gathered in Sydney’s beach suburb of Manly, to honor the visitors from California. We have a good photo of the three brothers, Gustav, Herman and Albert, together with Ken, during that visit. Albert spent most of his life, with his family, in California, following his profession of dentistry in a regular, disciplined practice. It was forty years later, long after Albert’s death, that my family and I were able to connect with his sons Glen and Kenneth in California and became acquainted with their hopeful American descendants.

Albert’s earliest years were spent, first as a baby, then a schoolboy, and later a vigorous teenager, while living in the early Brandstater house on Springdale Road in Bismarck, Tasmania. His father Emanuel Sr. had built this house for the family on a 37 acre section of farmland that he had acquired on generous terms from authorities in Hobart. Their job was to encourage men to open forested land to make room for cultivation of fruit and vegetables for the domestic market. So through his early years Albert was surrounded by a mixed farm, with cultivation of healthful fruit and vegetables, plus the eggs and dairy foods provided by their cows and chickens.

The house was some distance, possibly two miles on foot, from the village school that had been built by his father in 1876. So Albert did a lot of walking during his years in school. In the English tradition of his era, those years would have stretched from age 5 to age 14, though we don’t know how far into the high school years the public school in Bismarck could take him. By his mid-teens he would have been robust enough to do his fair share of heavy farm work. In the fruit picking season, apples, raspberries and gooseberries had to be harvested at exactly the best time, and that was also true of other crops like hops. The harvest season for the farms in the community required the help of every able-bodied person in the village, including youngsters like Albert.

What we do know about Albert is that he grew into a good-looking young man, with a mind to match, and was very likely influenced by the counsel of Ellen White when she visited Bismarck in 1895. Meeting these robust, thoughtful young Brandstater men, Gustav Adolph and Albert, both of them apparently locked into a narrow life on the farm, with limited future, Ellen White urged some further education, recommending the broadening effect of studying in Battle Creek College in Michigan. She saw the value to these young men of exposure to foreign travel and different cultures. Gustav Adolph was old enough to act soon on this advice, but the younger Albert had to wait some years for his turn to come.

At last it did come, and we can only imagine what painful family separations were involved. Neither Gustav nor Albert left us any descriptions of the studies they undertook at Battle Creek. They were dealing with educational methods at a different level, and very different from the traditional English approaches they had learned in Bismarck. In Battle Creek they would have faced some of the classic English subjects, including even the famous classical “Greats” that then marked most educated men: Latin, Greek, Philosophy and English Literature. In addition to stern book work, Albert would have been required to do many hours of work in the Kellogg Sanitarium, to help pay for his tuition. But we have no records of that. He would have joined the circles of sociable young Adventists who were either studying or were employed in Battle Creek. This group had social gatherings in Ellen White’s vacant house. His brother Gustav Adolph had preceded him in making new friends there, and as a result Gustav had married another visitor from Australia, Florence Grattidge. 

One feature of Albert’s life in Battle Creek that is significant was his talent with music. It was his son Kenneth who reported this to me, described from many reminiscences that passed between father and son. Albert was an active contributor to the music life at the College. It was likely a continuance of the music-making pleasures that he had enjoyed in his home community of Bismarck. He had a good singing voice, which was true also of other young Brandstater men from Bismarck, like Charlie, Gordon and Roy. At some point he joined a young woman named Margaret Kessell in singing fine vocal duets and they were eventually joined in marriage. We cannot tell much more about the Kessell family, but Margaret remained a sturdy part of the Brandstater family for the rest of her days. For some time after college, she and Albert formed a two-person evangelistic team. They were noted for their vocal talents, singing together and touring in the southern states where gospel music was popular. They sometimes even performed on river boats. Ken spoke proudly of that part of Albert’s life, although he described his mother Margaret in less glowing terms as a harsh disciplinarian. In time Margaret became better acquainted with the Australian Brandstaters, as she accompanied Albert when the time came for him to return to his home country and to his family in Tasmania.

We may wonder what kind of career awaited Albert in Tasmania. What we know is that he entered into a business partnership with his older brother, Emanuel Jr., to establish and operate a timber mill in the village of Bismarck. Both of the brothers had done a lot of timber work in their young growing years, and Emanuel Jr had acquired hands-on knowledge about steam engines and sawmill machinery. For a while, that Brandstater mill was successful. It was situated on the banks of Sorrell Creek that flowed through the village, and on an access road engineered for them by the county, and named Mill Road. It supplied much sawn hardwood, a commodity that was desperately needed for building construction work, then very active in Tasmania.

During that period in Tasmania, Albert and Margaret occupied a fine house that Emanuel Jr. had originally intended for his own young family. But in deference to the refined tastes of this new-coming American wife, the house became Margaret’s domain. Margaret had borne two sons previously, Oliver and Glenn, and while in Bismarck she gave birth to the youngest, Kenneth who subsequently was proud that he had been born an Australian. Meanwhile Emanuel Jr and his family moved to another house-and-farm at the end of Valley Road. Years later, this was the house and farm that became the property of Fred and Lydia Peterson.

Success at the Brandstater mill on Sorrell Creek did not last. At an undetermined date, the whole mill property was destroyed in a disastrous fire. So the enterprise that might have stabilized Albert in his home country, amongst his own people, became a grim failure and the partnership of brothers broke down. Both Emanuel and Albert had to find new sources of livelihood and new careers. Albert and Margaret weighed their options, and they decided to return to the U.S. where they could be closer to Margaret’s family, and Albert could pursue a professional career that he had chosen. It was dentistry. We do not know what led Albert to be attracted to dentistry. But his collegiate classwork in Battle Creek provided him with the credentials to get accepted into dental school at Stanford University. So Northern California became, during years of serious study, the home for Albert and Margaret. Apparently he was a competent student, and passed all his exams. He chose to set up dental practice in Los Angeles.

The rest of Albert’s life story was lived out in California, in the big city we know as Los Angeles. By searching, I found some traces of his presence there. In the early 1970s I met Dr. Lonser, who was a physician who had graduated from medical school at the College of Medical Evangelists in 1946. He remembered Albert as a church member, and also the office where Dr. Albert Brandstater had practiced dentistry in his early years. It was located on what is now Cesar Chavez Avenue, directly opposite the White Memorial Hospital.

Albert may have been influenced and helped by another Brandstater immigrant, William, the son of Gustav Adolph, who had been busily engaged developing a sanitarium in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. I met this William only once, in 1970, with his daughter Beverly, in their home on Doran Street in Glendale. I was taken there to meet them by cousin Ken Brandstater, and by Ken’s comments I gained the impression that these related families had kept a close connection. As a young man, William had left his family in Christchurch and had sought larger horizons in Los Angeles. There he became a physical therapist and he practiced in that field all his life. He and his wife Ruth and their daughter Beverly were well known members of the Glendale City Seventh-day Adventist Church. I understand that Albert and Margaret were also participating members of that church.

Albert and Margaret produced three sons, Oliver, Glenn and Kenneth, and the family lived in Ls Angeles. We have an excellent photograph of all five of them in those early years. They participated in the life of the Glendale City Church, and we can assume the three sons also took part in some of their church life. But their family life was described to me as not smooth and conducive to religious pursuits and Ken described Margaret as a stern disciplinarian

We are indebted to Kenneth for almost all that we now know about this early family. All three sons studied responsibly, and became credentialed dentists. The years of the War in the Pacific involved all three of them in some sort of military service that interrupted their pursuit of dental practice. They were distracted by other social pursuits as well.

Ken married a beautiful young woman named Mary Gaylord, and engaged seriously in dental practice in Los Angeles. In 1952 he drove me on a tour of Los Angeles, and pointed out the location of his dental office on Hollywood Boulevard. It was in August 1952 that Neridah and I first arrived in Los Angeles. There we enjoyed the hospitality of Ken and his wife Mary, with their two super-active young boys, Al and Bill.

So Ken Brandstater, Albert’s youngest son, became a leading member of the Californian branch of the Brandstater family. He took a keen interest in his grandchildren, and also in the larger family in Australia that his father had left behind. Cousins Gordon and Russell Branster had both visited Kenneth and his family in Los Angeles. Also, through his father Albert, Ken had learned about his cousins in Berlin, Wilhelm and Louisa Beutenmuller and their children. So at the end of World War II, with Berlin in ruins, Ken was able to contribute to helping young Willi and Gerda Beutenmuller and family after they had received permits to emigrate. They needed financial help to enable them to migrate to the New World, and finally settled in Los Angeles.

There is not much more we can recount about the life and career of Albert Brandstater. But there is a single photograph of the three aging brothers and the younger Ken when they visited Australia and met with other members of the family in Sydney. We still have more to learn about Albert’s later health issues, his last illness, and his final resting place.

Early in our life in Redlands, my father Roy and I were driven by Ken out to Palm Springs where Ken took us to greet his long-widowed mother, Margaret, at her retirement residence. She was bright-eyed and clearly delighted to meet at last some of the Brandstaters of whom she had heard much, but whom she never expected to meet. We were also pleased to meet this engaging lady who had shared an active life with Uncle Albert Brandstater.   We all knew, and she heartily concurred, that he was a good man and now represented by four capable descendants, grandchildren of Kenneth.