Joseph was the son of Joshua & Hannah Bradford. On January 20, 1774 in Wiscasset, Lincoln County, Maine, he married Abigail Starling. To this union, 11 children were born.

Joseph & Abigail and family removed from Meduncook to Sandy River Township in 1786.

Joseph is related to Gov. William Bradford of the Plymouth Plantation in Plymouth County, Massachsetts.

One such story in Joseph & Abby's travels:
Joseph Bradford was from Meduncook, now Friendship, in this State. His wife, formerly Abigail Starling, with her sister Dorothy, afterwards Mrs. Craig, - came from Friendship on horseback, but as they had one of Mrs. B's children to transport they could only ride by turns, - the one riding taking charge of the child. The road then was only a spotted line bushed out. During the French and Indian War of 1755 the parents of Mr. Bradford were inhumanly murdered by the Indians. They, with others equally enterprizing, had located themselves in what was then the new and thinly settled portion of the State known as Meduncook, and already had their labors been crowned with success. But the din of war, with its attendant perils, broke in upon their peaceful toils. A garrison was speedily erected and the various families removed there. Mr. B., residing but a short distance from the fort, and directly in view from it, he did not deem it necessary to remove, supporting that if alarmed they could easily reach its protecting shelter. One morning while Mr. B. Was engaged in pounding corn – a simple process of obtaining meal, a party of Indians was seen from the garrison to be approaching the house. An alarm gun was soon fired, but owing to the noise of the mortar it not heard by the inmates, and the Savages were not perceived till they entered the dwelling. They immediately dispatched Mr. And Mrs. B. A daughter of some twelve or fourteen years of age, who had sought a momentary concealment, sprung from under the bed, and caught the infant as it fell unharmed from the mother's arms, and fled through the open door for the garrison. The Indians pursued, but not being able to overtake her, threw a tomahawk, which inflicted a deep wound in her side. But the heroic girl, clasping the babe more firmly with one hand, and with the other prevented her intestines from falling to the ground, and in this situation she reached the garrison. She recovered from the wound and subsequently married and removed to Vermont, where she became the mother of a family of children. The Indians succeeded in capturing two of Mr. B's brothers, being young lads, and carried them to Canada. They were afterwards exchanged, but deceptively detained in the State of New York, but eventually reached home, after a lapse of some time, through a train of providential circumstances.

Another Story of Joseph's travels:

The town of Allagash, Aroostook County, Maine was established in 1886. The first people to settle in Allagash were Sara Ann, Anna and John Gardner and William Mullins. Their two brothers, John Webster and Joseph Bradford accompanied them, along with sister's six children. Their arrival to the area is dated 1838. On the third of December 1840, Anna and John Gardner had the first child to be born in Allagash. The boy was named Isaac Gardner.

Their trip to the Allagash area started in Campbellton (the Sugarloaf Mountain area). The families canoed up the Restigouche River, dropped down into the Wagan River at its confluence with the Restigouche, than poled southwest up the Wagan to an area maintained by the Government to keep bushes cleared for portage from the Wagan to the Wangases stream that joined the Grand River. The Grand entered the St. John River a few miles below St Leonard, N.B., Canada. A quote from Thoreau in 1857, on his Allagash River trip sheds more light on the waterway used from the Bay of Chaleur to the St. John River. "It appears that this party of hunters were going our way, but much farther down the Allagash and St. John and then up some other stream, across to the Retigouche and the Bay of Chaleur, to be gone six weeks."