We came to Canada in 1956 and "Bordt" was a unique name. I never met any others outside of my immediate family in Canada and in southern Germany (Korntal, near Stuttgart to be exact). My mother, Elfriede (known as Susie) once met a customs officer in New York who was surprised to see her name on her passport. "Hey, my name's Bordt, too!" and left it at that. It was probably the only time that he had ever run into another one, as well.

With the advent of the Internet, you can search for all kinds of things. Searches on "Bordt" are enlightening (to me, anyway). There are a few professors, a few rogues and a few Bordts in history. As far as we know, there were no Bordts involved in the War of 1812.

More Bordts

The reason I started this page was that I ran a Google search on "Michael Bordt" the other day and ran into one who had recently graduated from Duke University. I figured I'd try to make his acquaintance via e-mail and he responded rather quickly. His middle name is Ronald. I don't have a middle name, so the world should be able to tell us apart. When I mentioned that when I was younger, I was nicknamed "Mickey" he was amazed (Twilight Zone time!) because that, too, was his unsolicited moniker.

Karen Bordt is an elementary school teacher in Pittsburgh.

Ray Bordt runs a real estate office in North Carolina. Ray and I have exchanged e-mails.

Rebecca Bordt is a professor of sociology at DePauw University in Indiana. Rebecca Bordt joined the department as assistant professor of sociology in 2000. She received an M.S. in justice studies from Arizona State University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University in 1994. Her teaching and research interests include criminology, gender studies, and the sociology of organizations. She is the author of The Structure of Women�s Non-profit Organization (Indiana University Press, 1997) and has published articles on classroom teaching strategies, feminist collectives, gender differences in criminal court sentencing and informal dispute resolution. She is currently conducting a sociological analysis of prison narratives written by prisoners.
Outside of academia, Rebecca enjoys fixing up her "new" old home, learning about the flowers she inherited in the garden and biking with her 4.5 year-old son, Ely.

And then there's Chuck Bordt. We have no way of proving or disproving the accusation in the Usenet archive. Any defence, Chuck?

Links

All roads lead to www.bordt.com. There's also www.bordt.net (under construction) and www.bordt.org (Martin Bordt in Germany. Interesting page but it needs some work, too).

There's a construction machinery company in Stuttgart (!) called Baufahrzeuge Bordt.

There's yet another Michael Bordt writing on philosophy in Germany.

Mechthild Bordt-Haakshorst also shows up as an author on the German Amazon.de site. There's also Stephan Bordt who wrote "Strange Days in Hamburg" (I have had some of those. I'll have to read the book.) 

Keep looking and you'll find Brigitte Bordt who wrote a book (Ein Trotzkopf im Dirndl. Wei�blaue Geschichten aus Regensburg or A defiance head in the dirndl. White-blue stories from Regensburg in Googleish) about her childhood memories. Here's the Google auto translation of the review:

Like an eddy wind small Brigitte rushes by her childhood and holds the entire environment in breath. With the other halbwuechsigen Strolchen from its neighbourhood it heckt capers out and makes for its pointed name ' defiance head in the dirndl ' honour. There enormous school windows are thrown in, bitten impudent school fellow inside in the schienbein and fed the neighbour koestliche pears. Among the high points of this eventful childhood ranks the public Rezitation of Schillers ' bell ', which gives thundering applause to the temperful girl.

There's also Karl Bordt who wrote Das Grund- und Stammkapital der Kapitalgesellschaften (The reason and capital stock of the finance companies). I'll eventually elaborate on this.

In 1903, a company named Pallweber and Bordt, (later Adolf Bordt of Mannheim) produced an adding machine. You can still find these on eBay occasionally.

Other examples of efforts made towards the development of machines with simplified key arrangements are the Adix (1903), Diera (1906) and Adix (1903)Kuli (1909) adders manufactured by the Adix Company of Pallweber and Bordt of Mannheim. These machines had only 9 digit keys, the 10th key actually represented the number ten rather than the digit zero. The reason was that they were used to add single rows of digits, so the zero had no usage. The user had to keep track of the higher order digits on the results and reset the machine before re-entering those digits. The system was not easy to use and didn't provide significant savings of time, so their production was shortly discontinued. (from A Brief History of Mechanical Calculators Part III Getting Ready for the 20th Century by James Redin)

Any further contributions are welcome.

Stories

I tried looking into the family history but it ends after the few generations still remembered. I haven't dug into the historical records yet. If you run into anything, let me know.

The genealogical records in the US show a family of Bordts as far back as 1655. Andrew Bordt (born in about 1655 in Tyrrell Co., North Carolina, married Mary (born somewhere about 1670) and gave birth to Marya Bordt Bird in 1690. She was born in Mespath Kills, Long Island, New York and died there as well in 1758. Marya married Antoni Sadowski a Polish immigrant in 1705 and they raised 4 children Justina, Andrew, Anna and Sofia. Andrew reportedly met his demise at the hands of the Indians at the ripe age of 57. Justina only made it to 25 years of age and there's not much about Anna and Sofia.

Here's where is starts to get vaguely interesting. Andrew Sadowski married Catherine Innskeep. Together they raised 7 children: Emanual, Jonathan, Samuel, Jacob, James, Hannah and Anthony. Anthony (born in 1747 in Berks County, PA) later changed his name to SANDUSKY. The site by Howard Daniel Garner Jr. has different dates and calls everyone SANDUSKY. I'll work out the connection to the Ohio town at some time but it's not transparent.