Named after one of our distant relatives, "William Bradford," who served as a Governor and settler of the Plymouth colony. He was an English Separatist originally from Yorkshire. He moved to Leiden in Holland in order to escape persecution from King James I of England, and then emigrated to the Plymouth Colony on the Mayflower in 1620.
Fun Fact: Amazingly, just 12 or 16 generations after the Mayflower, an estimated 35 million people can trace their ancestry to one of these 51 "first comers" to the American Colony.