The family was first mentioned at the end of the 15th century in a register book of the city of Höxter on the river Weser, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Numerous of his descendants were doctors, jurists, politicians, and civil servants in what became the Electorate and later the Kingdom of Hanover.

He was the father of George Alexander Albrecht (1834–1898), who became a wealthy cotton merchant in the city state of Bremen, where he became part of the Hanseatic elite and was appointed as the Consul of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1895.

He married Baroness Louise Dorothea Betty von Knoop (1844–1889), the eldest daughter of the major cotton industrialist, Baron Ludwig Johann von Knoop, who had been ennobled in the Empire of Russia by Alexander II.

They were the parents of the cotton merchant Carl Albrecht (1875–1952), who married Mary Ladson Robertson (1883–1960), who belonged to a prominent American family of the Southern aristocracy from Charleston, South Carolina; she was a descendant of James Ladson and several colonial governors of Carolina.