Bullers in Molotschna villages

In pursuit of a better understanding of where in Molotschna colony our family—specifically, David and Helena Zielke Buller and their children, including Peter D—might have resided, today we survey various census, church, school, and legal records in which Bullers and their villages of residence or birth are listed.

As always, a map of Molotschna colony can help us navigate our way (for a larger version, open this link in another tab).

1. 1835 Molotschna census

Page from the 1835 census. See Ken Ratzlaff website here.

Although other records predate the 1835 census, it provides the most complete listing of all males in land-owning families (but not house owners or renters) within the Molotschna colony. Among this list of 2,714 individuals one finds 13 Bullers living in the following villages (year in which village established given in parentheses):

• Alexanderwohl: 8 (1821)
• Lindenau: 2 (1804)
• Franzthal: 1 (1820)
• Liebenau: 1 (1823)
• Prangenau: 1 (1824)

2. 1847 voting records

As mentioned previously, Molotschna Mennonites elected their own village and district leaders (see further here). Fortunately, the voter list for the 1847 election has survived and provides a record of the 1,075 land owners who cast a vote (only land owners had the right to vote), including 5 Bullers and their villages of residence (for the complete list, see here):

• Alexanderwohl: 3 (1821)
• Friedensdorf: 1 (1824)
• Landskrone: 1 (1839, so after the 1835 census)

3. 1863 grain loan

A severe winter the year before led to a poor harvest in 1863, leaving many Molotschna residents—landed and landless alike—in need of assistance. The colony maintained grain reserves for just such a situation, and the records of the loans of grains made still exists. Of the 1,958 individuals listed, 13 are Bullers (Johann Siebert is also listed):

• Alexanderwohl: 3 (1821)
• Friendensdorf: 3 (1824)
• Gnadenthal: 2 (1862)
• Wernersdorf: 2 (1824)
• Hierschau: 1 (1848)
• Steinfeld: 1 (1857)
• Waldheim: 1 (1836)

4. School registers 

In all likelihood, every village school kept records of the students who attended each year, how often they were absent, and if any unusual circumstances attended the student’s performance or enrollment (see previously here). Combing through the available evidence for the years 1853–1884 linked here, one discovers 29 different Buller families (families are identified by father, with the names and ages of children listed after him) and their villages:

• Waldheim: 7 (1836)
• Alexanderwohl: 6 (1821)
• Hierschau: 6 (1848)
• Friedensdorf: 2 (1824)
• Nikolaidorf: 2 (1851)
• Gnadenheim: 1 (1821)
• Gnadenthal: 1 (1862)
• Hamberg: 1 (1863)
• Paulsheim: 1 (1852)
• Rudnerweide: 1 (1820)
• Schardau: 1 (1820)

Schnurbuch page showing contribution
from Peter Buller of Paulsheim.

5. 1874 Schnurbuch

As discussed earlier here, Molotschna Mennonites formed an aid society to loan funds to those who wished to emigrate to the U.S. but who could not afford to do so. Of the 134 persons listed, 10 bear the surname Buller (4 as contributors and 6 [including 3 widows] as borrowers); 6 of them have a Molotschna village listed:

• Alexanderwohl: 2 (1821)
• Gnadenthal: 1 (1862)
• Hierschau: 1 (1848)
• Paulsheim: 1 (1852)
• Steinfeld: 1 (1857)

6. Alexanderwohl church register

The register first begun in Przechovka, West Prussia, was continued in a new book after the congregation moved to Molotschna colony and established both the village of and a church in Alexanderwohl. That portion of the church register lists 48 Bullers with a birthplace or residence in Molotschna. The distribution of Bullers across the villages is as follows:

• Alexanderwohl: 20 (1821)
• Waldheim: 7 (1836)
• Landskrone: 6 (1839)
• Hierschau: 4 (1848)
• Paulsheim: 3 (1852)
• Friedensdorf: 2 (1824)
• Nikolaidorf: 2 (1851)
• Steinfeld: 2 (1857)
• Gnadenfeld: 1 (1835)
• Mariawohl: 1 (1857)

So, what do we see when we put all these numbers together? First, at least one Buller lived in nearly a third of all the villages in Molotschna—twenty-one out of sixty-five villages. Second, 60 percent of the 114 documented Molotschna Bullers lived in just three villages, and over a third were located in the village of Alexanderwohl:

• Alexanderwohl: 42 (1821)
• Waldheim: 15 (1836)
• Hierschau: 12 (1848)

Third, other villages near the top of the list were located close to the top three, as is evident in the map below, which shows the eight villages with the highest numbers of Bullers (97 Bullers in all).

Clearly, most Bullers were located in the center of the colony, rather close to one another. As we look further for our ancestors, this is presumably where we should focus our search.

Fourth and last, Peter D’s residence in Kleefeld, then Alexanderkrone, then Kleefeld again took him away roughly 6–8 miles from the main concentration of Molotschna Bullers. This coheres with and perhaps confirms our sense that Peter was more closely identified with wife Sarah’s family than with his own.

An afterword about Helena

It occurs to me that we may well have Dutch blood running through our veins after all—albeit from Helena Zielke rather than David Buller. Note in the post below that Schrag indicates that the twenty-one Mennonite families who settled Zofyovka in Volhynia came from the Netherlands via Prussia (“Dutch Prussian”). What an interesting reversal of our expectations this would be!

Helena was born in Poland

The Buller Family Record contains an intriguing note on the matriarch of generation 1, Helena Zielke (wife of David Buller): the record states that she was born in Poland. David, it further notes, was born in Prussia. What is meant by this enigmatic “born in Poland” comment, particularly in light of David Buller being born in Prussia?

One theory is that the Polish birthplace hints at Helena Zielke’s ethnicity, that she was Polish. If so, then the storyline might be that Mennonite David Buller married outside of his group, ethnically and perhaps even religiously. Although uncommon, marriage outside of the group (in sociological terms, exogamy) was possible for Mennonites.

In this instance, however, there seems a better explanation. According to the Grandma database, 342 Mennonites have had the surname Zielke. Further, all Mennonite Zielkes are said to come from the same area: the Volhynia region (the yellow area in the map below).

As is immediately clear, the Volhynia region extends across several nations (whose borders shifted throughout history), so although it is not precisely correct to say that Helena was born in Poland, it seems permissible to refer to the area of her birth as being in the area of Poland. What more might we learn about the area of Helena Zielke’s birth?

Mennonites lived in various villages within several settlements in the Volhynia region between the years 1800 and 1874. According to Martin H. Schrag, after the initial group of Mennonites settled in villages near Ostrog (in the map above, on the river southeast of Rivne), additional Mennonite groups moved to Volhynia, including the area around Luck/Lutsk (see map above). This group is of special interest to us.

Schrag writes:

The best known of these migrations was that of a group of 21 [Dutch Prussian] Mennonite families with the names of Beyer, Bose, Dirks, Voth, Nachtigall, Nickel, Pankratz, Richard, Sperling, Unruh, and Ziekle [sic: Zielke is meant], who in 1811 entered into a contract with the nobleman Waclav Borejko, settling on his land and founding the vil­lage of Zofyovka located north of the town of Wysock on the Horyn River. The terms of the contract were very good, … but the land on which they located was marshy. The group left Zofyovka in 1828 and established “Ostrova” which is identical with Jozefin, 20 miles northeast of Luck, Volhynia. They also settled in the neigh­boring village that they again named Zofyovka.

After mentioning two additional migrations to Volhynia, Schrag adds:

In 1836 (some writers suggest 1838) the Men­nonites living in the above villages…, 40 families in all, left Volhynia, and settled in the south Ukrainian Molotschna Mennonite settlement, where they founded the village of Waldheim, a name carried with them from Volhynia.

This would be the Waldheim that is located eight miles west-northwest of Alexanderwohl (see the map here), the same Waldheim where Bullers are known to have lived (more on that later). So, it would seem fair to surmise that Helena Zielke’s family was part of the group of twenty-one Dutch Mennonite families who first migrated from Prussia to Volhynia, then to Molotschna, where they founded the village of Waldheim.*

One final intriguing note: the first Mennonite village in Volhynia was named Karolswalde, about which Ernst Crous comments: “Names of common occurrence were Becker, Buller, Decker, Dirks, Goertz, Koehn, Schartner, Siebert, Thomas, and Unruh.” Not only is our name listed but also several of the names that we saw earlier in the Przekhovka church register (Becker, Decker, Dirks, Köhn, Thoms/Thomas, and Unrau/Unruh); Siebert also makes appearance, the first time we have encountered it.

It is not yet clear what we should make of all this (not enough dots to connect into a picture), but it is intriguing that the Zielkes lived in Volhynia and moved to Waldheim, Molotschna, that Bullers also lived in Volhynia (ca. 100 miles away), that our family of Bullers moved to Molotschna fifteen years before the Zielkes, and that somehow the families became joined through the marriage of David Buller and Helena Zielke. As is often the case, we end with unanswered questions:

• Did some Bullers and Zielkes in Volhynia know each other? If so, was this a factor in David and Helena marrying?
• Were Bullers part of the group that founded Waldheim? If so, how were they related to the David Buller line?
• Did the Zielkes associate with the Alexanderwohl church, as we assume the Bullers to have done?

Maybe someday we will be able to fill in this and other dots that enable us to sketch the picture with a bit more detail and accuracy.

*****

* Apparently by 1848 a large number of this group had grown dissatisfied with life in Molotschna and migrated back to the Volhynia region. Since David and Helena are said to have died in Russia, they were not part of the returning group.

Source

Crous, Ernst. 1957. Karolswalde (Rivne Oblast, Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Grandpa’s siblings 6

Of Peter P and Margaretha’s twelve children, six were sons and six were daughters. This post is about child seven and daughter four: Elizabeth P Buller.

Elizabeth P Buller in 1923, the year of her baptism.

Elizabeth was born 21 March 1904 and was baptized 20 May 1923. Like her older sister Katharina and her older brother Benjamin, Elizabeth was baptized by Heinrich Epp of the Bethesda Mennonite Church.*

Two years later, on 19 August 1925, Elizabeth wed David A. Regier. Their family came to include five children: Peter, David, Frederick, Levi, and Margaret Alice. Elizabeth lived to the age of eighty-four, passing away on 27 July 1988. David lived four years beyond that. Both are buried in the Buller–Siebert/Mennonite Cemetery southeast of Henderson.

* With all of the baptisms thus far noted, the person being baptized was roughly nineteen to twenty-one years old. Presumably this was (is?) fairly common for Mennonite adult baptism. A future post will explore other aspects of baptism, such as the likelihood that Molotschna churches held one large baptismal service each year, generally in May–July.

Not Dutch?

Mennonite Quarterly Review continues to be a source of intriguing information. An earlier post (see here) mentioned an MQR article that provided evidence of at least one individual with the surname Buller being in Switzerland in the last quarter of the seventeenth century (1684). This post considers a potentially related and remarkable claim.

In an article entitled “The Marriage Records of Montau in Prussia for 1661–1704,” Adalbert Goertz states, “Most names with endings of -er and -el may be of non-Dutch origin, such as Baltzer, Becher, Decker, Buller, Kerber, Kliewer, Kopper, Bartel, Nickel, Rempel, and Wedel, all of which have a Silesian-Bavarian-Swiss flavor” (1976, 240).

Goertz offers no further explanation or evidence, but his reputation as a Mennonite genealogist and specialist in Prussian Mennonite history should lead us to give his claim some weight, at least until evidence points us in a different direction.

For the time being, all we can do is consider how his claim might inform or influence what we have already discovered.

Pictured to the right is a document we have examined several times: the church register from Przechovka in West Prussia, the church that later moved to Alexanderwohl in the Molotschna colony and then later still to the plains of Kansas.

As noted previously, the register is arranged by last name, twenty-four of which are listed as being the most common: Wedel, Becker, Buller, Cornels, Decker, Dirks, Frey, Funck, Harparth, Jantz, Isaac, Köhn, Nachtigahl, Pankratz, Penner, Ratzlaff, Richert, Schellenberger, Schmidt, Sparling, Tesmer, Thoms, Unrau, and Voth.

In case the overlap is not immediately obvious, four of the eleven names that Goertz lists are in this single church. That seems noteworthy, possibly significant.

To turn things around and look at the matter from the other direction, eight of the twenty-four family names in the Przechovka church have an ending of -er or -el(s). Again, this seems a high percentage (such names only account for a quarter of the fifty most frequent Mennonite names), especially in light of one additional consideration: Goertz states that names ending in -er or -el may be of a non-Dutch origin; he does not say that only names ending in -er or -el are non-Dutch. Thus, it would not be surprising if some of the other surnames in the church (e.g., perhaps Jantz, Köhn, Schmidt, Unrau, or Voth) have a “Silesian-Bavarian-Swiss flavor” as well.

If Goertz is correct that names ending in -er or -el have a particular geographical affinity, and if the percentage of such names is higher than normal in this particular church, then what we may be seeing is the association of people based not just on a common faith but also on a shared ethnic background. Such ethnic- or language-based grouping is not unusual; we see the same thing even today. Further, although Menno Simons was Dutch, not all early Mennonites came from the Netherlands; many came from the Swiss and Germanic sphere. Could it be that our ancestors originated in that part of Europe rather than in the Low Countries of the Netherlands?

Source

Goertz, Adalbert. 1976. The Marriage Records of Montau in Prussia for 1661–1704. MQR 50:240–50.

Traveling by train and ship and train

Bernhard Warkentin was a Molotschna Mennonite of some means who toured the U.S. in 1872. Once here, he never returned. Eventually Warkentin became known for playing a key role in promoting the Mennonites’ Turkey Red hard winter wheat in North America and developing the milling industry in Kansas.

Before then, however, he served as a midwife of sorts, helping other Molotschna Mennonites make the trek from Russia to the U.S. One of Warkentin’s letters to a friend (we read elsewhere that it took forty days for a letter to be delivered) includes details that help fill in some gaps in our understanding of our ancestors’ journey from Kleefeld to Henderson. Warkentin writes:

As I have answered your questions to the best of my knowledge in my previous letter, I shall now just repeat; do not bring any unnecessary articles along, see to it that you will not have over four hundred pounds of baggage with your family, for each immigrant has two hundred pounds baggage free, children twelve years old, only one hundred pounds; they pay only half fare. —In Russia and Germany you may have to pay something for the baggage; if I am not mistaken the passenger on the ship is allowed two hundred pounds, in addition to what he has with him as hand baggage, and this should never be more than one absolutely needs and can carry comfortably. —What you ought to bring along you will know best; I would advise you at this time to bring the good featherbeds, the sheepskins, and the clothes which you already have will do no harm, but it would not be advisable to buy many new things. —Bring as much linen as you have, for that is very expensive here,—besides, hardly anyone wears linen, only cotton is used. —Do not bring kitchen utensils or implements of any kind ; what you have, sell there, for it is easiest and most convenient to carry the money for those articles in one’s pocket, for which everything can be bought here. How you are going to travel from Hamburg or Bremen, either in a cabin $100 per passenger, or in steerage $55 per passenger, is still a question. If you travel in a cabin you need not be concerned about anything after you have booked your baggage, since everything is taken care of, but if you travel in steerage you should provide yourself with bedding and kitchen utensils, for the steerage passenger also receives food, and I think enough, although it is quite plain. I would advise, however, that all who possibly can should spend the extra $45 and travel in a cabin; at any rate, older people and families with little children should do so. And so I would advise you too, as friend, not to travel in steerage, but in a cabin. Those who want to save and leave Hamburg in steerage, despite the fact that they have the means, would often regret on the voyage not to have taken a cabin. Young people could travel in steerage out of consideration for their purse, for in the end it takes only ten to twelve days till they again have firm ground under foot.  … The fare on an immigrant train from New York to St. Louis is from $15–$20 (I am not certain yet, but it is not more). (Krahn 1950, 255, 256)

Using the information shared in Warkentin’s letter, we might deduce the following for our family.

• As indicated by the ship manifest discussed here (see also here), our ancestors did not spend the extra $45 for cabin accommodations and traveled instead in steerage class. Thus, the cost for the ocean portion of the journey would have been roughly $275 (two adults at $55 + six children at $27.50).
• Assuming that travel by train from Philadelphia to Lincoln cost slightly more than the New York–St. Louis trip, and assuming that children received a reduced fare (as seems common), one could suggest that the last leg of the journey cost $125 (two adults at $25 and six children at $12.50).
• We have no evidence about how much the train ride from Hochstadt, Germany, to Antwerp, Belgium cost, but if it was roughly the same as the last leg of the journey, then Peter D and Sarah needed an additional $125 for their family.
• All told, then, the travel charges for this one family’s move to Henderson were likely in the vicinity of $525. As further noted in Warkentin’s letter, there were additional expenses along the way, such as baggage fees and possibly food during the train portions of the trek.
• In theory, the Buller family of eight could have taken a thousand pounds of baggage (200 lbs. for each of two adults + 100 lbs. each for the six children) without paying extra, although it seems hard to imagine moving with that many goods.

The more we learn about our ancestors’ journey, the more awe-inspiring it becomes. Not only was their trek both long and arduous (steerage class was a miserable way to travel), but it also involved significant cost ($525 is equivalent to $12,500 today) and effort (keeping track of six children and who knows how many pounds of baggage). Finally, if, as was suggested before, Johann Siebert financed the journey for all of his children who moved at that time (fourteen full fares and eleven half-fares), his contribution to his family’s future prospects (nearly $50,000 in today’s dollars) is seen to be truly remarkable.

Source

Krahn, Cornelius, ed. 1950. Some Letters of Bernhard Warkentin Pertaining to the Migration of 1873–1875. MQR 24:248–63.

Grandpa’s siblings 5

With this post, we are halfway through Peter P and Margaretha’s twelve children.

1. Peter, the first, died eight days after he was born in August 1891.
2. Margaretha followed in 1892; in time she raised four children with Klaas T. Friesen.
3. Katharina was born in 1895; she and Dietrich C. Quiring had eleven kids.
4. Benjamin, who was born in 1897, married Anna Regier and raised seven children with her.
5. Sara followed in 1899; never marrying, she pursued a nursing career.

This brings us to Klaas P Buller, child number six.

Klaas P Buller in 1926, the year of his wedding.

Klaas was born 3 March 1902, two and a half years after Sara. He was baptized at the age of twenty-one, on 20 May 1923. Three years later, on 21 March 1926, he married Anna Hiebner. Together they raised six or seven children. Interestingly, the Buller Family Record lists Mabel, Agnes, Katherine, Margaret, Arnold, and Raymond, but the Grandma database indicates that there was a seventh child between Katherine and Margaret. Neither the name nor the gender of the child is known.

The 1930 census lists Klaas as a farmer, but there is no record of where he farmed. However, with a little detective work, we can venture a reasonable guess. A census sheet (viewable here) of this era listed people roughly in the order in which the census taker encountered them. Therefore, noting that Klaas and Anna (no children at that time) are listed after two Ronne families and are followed by Mrs. Jacob F. Epp and children, Mrs. Cornelius Dahlke and children, then Peter P and Margaretha and the four children still living at home, Peter P Siebert, and D. D. Epp and family, one can develop an idea of where Klaas and Anna might have lived: between several Ronne families and Peter P’s farm, likely with an Epp and or a Dahlke nearby.

Looking closely at the map of Henderson Township below (for the full map, see here), we can see that there were four Ronne families on the east half of section 12 and that Peter P Buller owned the east half of section 11. In addition, Jacob F. Epp owned farmland on the same section 11 as Peter P, and Peter Siebert lived and farmed in section 12, across the road east from Peter P. All this suggests strongly that Klaas and Anna farmed somewhere nearby. They are not included on this 1924 map, of course, because they did not establish their household until 1926: But given what we already know about Peter P and Margaretha’s practice, one might reasonably suggest that the 120 acres owned by P. P. Buller in section 13 was given, sold, and/or rented to Klaas and Anna after they married. This would explain the progress of the census (Ronnes followed by Klaas followed by his parents) and cohere with the family tradition of Peter P and Margaretha setting up their children with farmland.

At some point Klaas and Anna moved to York, where he continued to reside until he passed away in Lincoln, Nebraska, on 8 May 1971, at the age of sixty-nine. Anna outlived him by twenty-three years. Klaas’s funeral was held at the First United Methodist Church in York, after which he was buried in the Greenwood Cemetery on the west side of York.

*****

Additional note on Katharina and Dietrich C. Quiring: Looking north of Peter P’s farm in section 11, one sees that the southeast quarter of section 2 was owned by D. C. Quiring. Certainly this must be Dietrich and Katharina, right? Further, glancing to the east at section 1, what is one to make of Katherine Quiring being named the owner of the west half of the southeast quarter of that section? Did Peter P and Margaretha purchase that 80-acre tract and deed it to their daughter Katharina alone, not to the couple together? Intriguing and revealing, if that is in fact the case.

I have a hanger …

By my count, Grandma and Grandpa had thirty-one grandchildren by the late 1960s, each of whom (I believe) received a Christmas present (or two) every year. If my memory can be trusted, most years each of us received a Christmas-themed card with $2 tucked inside. That may not sound like much, but it was big money for a ten-year-old in 1967.

Several other times we also received something special, in addition to the cash, something a bit more personal and enduring. So it was that one Christmas (I don’t remember which) each of the grandkids received a crotchet-covered hanger like the one pictured below.

I cannot begin to imagine how many hours Grandma spent crocheting covers for thirty-one hangers. I cannot fathom the love that she put into every stitch of every cover. However, I do know that nearly fifty years later the hanger Grandma gave me endures and reminds me how blessed I am (we are) to have been born into the family of Malinda and Chris Buller and their eight wonderful children.

You see, I have a hanger in my closet that reminds me who I am and where I come from every time I see it—one of the best gifts that anyone could ever receive.

Marie Ruth Hiebner Buller, 1932–2014

Sad news came last night that Aunt Marie passed away a few days ago, on Sunday, 21 December. Marie Ruth Hiebner was born 21 January 1932 and married Daniel C Buller on 25 April 1951. Together they raised six children.

According to the York News Times, a memorial service will take place Tuesday, 30 December, in Torrington, Wyoming (see further here).

If you would like to send a message to the family or share a memory of Aunt Marie, you can do so on her Tribute Page at the Colyer Funeral Home website here.

If anyone would like to send photos or memories of Aunt Marie to this blog, that would be much appreciated.

Sincere condolences to Daniel, Sheryl, Stan, Brenda, Debbie, Denise, Michael, and the rest of the immediate family. You are in all of our prayers and thoughts.

One more name post

A number of years ago the Mennonite Quarterly Review published an article by Isaac Zürcher entitled “Anabaptist-Mennonite Names in Switzerland.” The first part of the article describes Zürcher’s data pool and methodology; the second part provides a list of over 1,500 Mennonite surnames that appear in a variety of Swiss documents both legal and religious, public and private, between the years 1525 and 1799.

Building housing the State Archive of Bern

Not all the surnames represented Swiss natives or citizens; some no doubt entered the Swiss record as a result of traveling through the region or perhaps sojourning there for a time. Still, it comes as some surprise to find the name Buller (no unlaut!) in the list, two slots below Bühler (with an umlaut!). The attestation of Buller dates to the year 1684, that for Bühler to the very beginning of the period: 1525.

If anyone happens to be in Bern, Switzerland, and gains access to the State Archives of Canton Bern, the surname Buller is mentioned in the Ratsmanuale (Council Manual) for 1601–1700, A II 511 Vol. 199: 6 February 1684–23 August 1684, page 447.

Whether or not one of us ever sees the actual record and its context (Was it legal in nature? religious? something else?), we do need to ponder the significance of the fact that one of the earliest attestations of our family name that we have thus far encountered comes from Switzerland.

Traditional Christmas songs

You have your traditions, I have mine—enjoy!

“Dogs Barking Jingle Bells” actually was quite a technological advance in the early 1950s, as this Atlantic Monthly article explains (apologies for the annoying ad you have to wait through).

The following Christmas song also brings me the cheer of the season!

Fröhlich Wiehnachten! (“Merry Christmas” in Low German)

*** Wednesday Update ***
Dad advised me last night that in the Buller household the phrase was “Scheen Wiehnacht!” (scheen means “lovely, fine, beautiful”). This led to a series of Google searches today to learn more about this. Unfortunately, there are no attestations of this phrase, although it is a possible construction, since the words do mean that. Perhaps this is a matter of differing dialects; there is, after all, no single Low German language but rather a variety of dialects that are collected under the broader umbrella term.

That being said, it appears that a more common way to wish someone a Merry Christmas in Low German is to say “Froohe Wiehnacht!” For more Wiehnacht fun, read Jack Thiessen’s rendition of “The Night before Christmas” in Low German (here).

If you have more traditional tastes, you may enjoy “Silent Night” in (High) German.

Until tomorrow’s post about a hanger in my closet, “Froohe Wiehnacht junt aulem, enn uck Goode Nacht!"

Grandpa’s siblings 4

Thus far we have learned about Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller’s four oldest children: Peter, who died eight days after birth in 1891; Margaretha, who was born a year later and married Klaas Friesen; Katharina, wife of Dietrich Quiring; and Benjamin, husband of Anna Regier. Today we move to the next in line: Sara P Buller.

Born 30 September 1899, Sara never married; instead, she served as a nurse both in Nebraska and in California. To the best of my knowledge, Sara moved to California with her parents; indeed, I believe she lived either with them or close by for most of her life.

The York News Times obituary for her notes that, when she died 27 October 2002 at the age of 103, she was the last surviving member of her immediate family, with only two sisters-in-law remaining: Elsie (Peter) Buller of Omaha and Beatrice (Henry) Buller of Beaumont, Texas (see here).

Sara was laid to rest in the Mennonite (Buller–Siebert) Cemetery with her parents and many of her siblings.

Still more on names

Stupid Mennonite joke: What were the names of the three Mennonite farmers caught in a blizzard? Wiebe Friesen Fast (rim shot)

*******

While we’re on the subject of last names, what would you guess are the most common Mennonite last names? Further, where do you think Buller (and its variations) ranks on the list of Mennonite last names?

We’ll start with the second question. If you recall, the Grandma database includes 1,318,127 different individuals, 5,795 of whom are named Buller, Buhler, or the like. Stated differently, .4 percent of all Mennonites are named Buller. Less than one-half of one percent? That’s not very many.

Further, according to the website Chortitza (see here and scroll down), Buller is number 44 on the list of most common Mennonite surnames. We rank below Penner, Regier, Rempel, Funk, Wiebe, Peters, Thiessen, and Sawatsky but are more numerous than Ratzlaff, Pankratz, Block, Franz, and Siebert. (Be aware that the totals given on the website are dated, but the rankings are generally the same.)

Now back to the first question. By far the most common Mennonite names are Dyck/Dueck/Dick and Friesen/Riesen, both of which are approaching 40,000 individuals in the current Grandma database totals. In other words, almost 6 percent of all Mennonites in the database have one of those surnames.

Several final factoids before we leave this subject:

1. Another page on the Chortiza website (here) lists the most common Mennonite first, or given, names. For males, Johann leads all by a wide margin and is followed by Jacob and Peter.


2. The most common female names are Maria, Katarina, and Anna.


3. Grandma reports that cruel Mennonite parents named 816 sons Peter Peters, seven sons Jacob Jacobs, and one poor chap Franz Franz.

More on the surname Buller

A recent post explored the spelling—and pronunciation—of our family name based on the church registers from Przechovka, West Prussia, and Alexanderwohl, Molotschna colony. The Grandma database offers another perspective on our family name.

The acronymn Grandma stands for Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry. This resource, developed by the Genealogy Project Committee of the California Mennonite Historical Society, contains “a genealogical database of people whose ancestral lines include Mennonites or Hutterites who at some time lived in Poland, Ukraine, or Russia.” As of November 2014, Grandma listed 1,318,127 individuals of Mennonite heritage.

The Grandma database allows users to search in a variety of ways: first name + last name, last name only, or relationship (parent–child or husband–wife). It also allows users to search for exact matches (e.g., search only for Anna Buller, not Ann Buller) or for all known spelling variations.

For example, a search to identify all the Bullers regardless of how the name is spelled in Grandma returns 5,795 records. The list of names returned by the search also reveals all the spellings of our name that Grandma’s developers regard as a possible variant of Buller (see below).

The most common spelling is, as expected, Buller, with 3,457 of the 5,795 total (59.6 percent). Not terribly far behind is Buhler, with 2,240 (38.7 percent). Other names account for the final 1.7 percent of listings:

• Buehler: 47
• Bollee: 24
• Boehler: 15
• Boller: 9
• Buler: 3
• Boler: 2

Interestingly, there is only a single instance of Büller with an umlaut in the Grandma database, and it is not associated with our family name.

In light of the data, one wonders: Given what we know about the the fluidity of spelling in ancient times, are Buller and Buhler acceptable variants of the surname for the same general family group? Or, might Buller and Buhler point to some sort of difference in origin? To ask the question slightly differently, do all Mennonites with the name Buller or Buhler ultimately derive from the same area, or might one family group have originated in one region (say, Holland) and the other family group in another region (maybe Germany)? I know of no way to answer this question, but it seems to me a possibility that would explain this particular spelling variation.

One thing we can know from this short excursion is that the spelling Buller without an umlaut is the standard one. Thus, the Mennonite Encyclopedia entry that lists Büller as a common variant should be called into question. The data simply do not support such an assertion.

Grandpa’s siblings 3

The fourth child born into the Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller family—after Peter, Margaretha, and Katharina—was Benjamin, who was born 5 July 1897. The name Benjamin was not common for our family, but Peter P’s father Peter D had a brother named Benjamin (in other words, Peter P’s uncle), which may have been the inspiration for naming this son Benjamin.

Benjamin was baptized 20 May 1918 at Bethesda Mennonite Church and married Anna Regier on 3 January 1924. Like his older sister Katharina, he was baptized and married by Heinrich H. Epp of the Bethesda Mennonite Church.

Benjamin and Anna raised seven children: four girls and three boys. Those of us who grew up in the Lushton-Henderson area may remember several of Benjamin and Anna’s children as adults: John B. (and Susie) Buller, who lived north and west of Grandpa and Grandma’s Lushton farm; and Abe (and Alice) Buller, who lived 6.5 miles east of Henderson.

Benjamin passed away at the age of sixty-nine, on 3 December 1966. He, and later Anna, was buried in the Bethesda Cemetery northeast of Henderson.

Grandpa was the eighth child in his family, so we have three more older siblings to go.

What is the “correct” spelling of our name?

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are certain things about our family that are known knowns; we know we know them (e.g., Peter D, Sarah, and family came to the U.S. in 1879). There are also known unknowns: we know that we don’t know who David Buller’s parents were. Part of the fun of historical exploration is that it often uncovers a third category: unknown unknowns, that is, things that we didn’t previously know that we didn’t know.

Up to now, I think, the spelling of our last name has been in the third category. Because we have been so accustomed to seeing “Buller,” we did not consider whether this was the “correct” spelling at all. Now, I am not suggesting for a minute that there is only one way to spell our name and that all other spellings are incorrect. But it can be both instructive and geeky fun to explore the question of how our family name has been spelled over the last several centuries.

A simple Google search of the words Buller last name origin leads to several interesting proposals about the origin of our name, as well as at least one historical note worth pursuing at some point in the future:

This most interesting surname is of either Old French or early medieval German origin, and has three possible interpretations. Firstly, it may be of Old French origin as an occupational name for a scribe or copyist, from the Old French, Middle English “bulle”, letter, document. Secondly, it may be a French habitational name, possible from “Bouille”; the “-er” may have arisen by analogy with other Norman placenames in “-iere”. Finally, it may be of early medieval German origin, from the Middle High German “bullen”, to roar, which was a nickname for a man with a loud voice. The surname first appears in the Church Registers of early German States in the 16th Century.… Other early examples of the surname include: the birth of a son to Peter and Klara Buhler, in 1588 at Arnstedt, Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen; and the marriage of John Buller and Phillippa Percyvell on April 14th 1603 at St. Nicholas’s, Cole Abbey, London.” (see The Internet Surname Database, which also sells the faux scroll pictured to the right)

Not to be missed in this recital of known knowns and known unknowns is a crucial fact: the surname Buller originated independently in two different contexts: England and the Germanic sphere. We are no doubt derived from the latter, not from the former, who came to the U.S. two centuries before the Mennonite Bullers. This distinction is important to keep in mind when one sees Buller crests, coats of arms, and explanations that Bullers were originally scribes; these have nothing to do with our family.

All that is background and laying the foundation for the real point of this post: to explore how our family name has been spelled—and thus likely was pronounced—over the last few centuries. We take as our primary body of evidence the church registers from Przekhovka and Alexanderwohl. But first, a necessary reminder: during the period in question, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rules of writing were far less important than they are today. Writing was governed primarily by what was heard; the goal of writing was to reproduce pronunciation, not to follow an authoritative set of rules that specified how a word should be spelled. So, when we see variations in how our name has been spelled, we should keep in mind that these are a matter of variation in pronunciation or the recording of pronunciation, not of right or wrong spellings.

We begin with the initial Buller section in the Przekhovka register.

Nothing unusual with the spelling of Buller here, apart from the use of -s on the end of female names discussed earlier. However, there is an odd mark above the letter u in one of the Bullers in this group of 50+ names.

My first thought was that this was likely a stray pen stroke, but later in the church register the mark pops up again. Number 1139, Jacob Buller, appears without a mark, but farther down on the same page, number 1151, a Buller whose first name is not known, has the same mark above the right side of the letter u. Four lines below that the mark appears with 1155, Elcke Bullers.

Subsequent appearances of Buller at first do not have the mark (1198, 1218, 1224, 1264, 1275, 1296, 1332, 1354, 1513) but generally do have it later on (1365, 1384, 1398, 1423, 1429, 1443, 1450, 1454, 1463, 1475, 1489, 1528, 1535, 1554, 1567, 1575; also when Peter Buller 359’s name is repeated on page 92). The possible meaning of this apostrophe-like mark will be taken up below.

Still later a new variation appears: what looks like a circumflex ( ˆ ) over the u. It appears clearly in numbers 1608 and 1615; the symbol is closed ( º ), whether by design or accident, in 1602 and 1609.

The variation in the mark used (apostrophe, circumflex, circle) is probably due to the fact that various writers added to the register; presumably they all signify roughly the same thing about how the name Buller was to be pronounced. What that pronunciation might have been becomes clearer when one examines the Alexanderwohl continuation of the church register.

In nearly every case the Alexanderwohl book uses an apostrophe-like mark (or a backward c) over the u in Buller, as seen below in Jacob, David (no, not that David), and Helena Buller.

Significantly, the Alexanderwohl register includes other diacritical marks over vowels, including an umlaut over the u in Hübert (what we know as the surname Huebert):

This tells the reader how to pronounce the name: HYOO-bert. There is a clear y sound preceding the u sound. Why is this important? The use of a mark other than an umlaut over the u in Buller implies that our name was not pronounced BYOO-ler. If the secretary writing in the Alexanderwohl book had heard BYOO-ler, he or she would have written our name with an umlaut.

So how was our name pronounced back in the day? The mark used most commonly may provide a hint. In all likelihood, this apostrophe-like mark/backward c is an apex, which Latin, and later other languages, used to mark a long vowel. The mark may indicate, therefore, that the u in Buller was not a short u (as in English push) or an umlaut u (as in Huebert) but a long u as in the English word boot.

I should note that this is not the standard understanding of our name. In fact, Gustav Reimer writes: “Buller (Büller) is a Mennonite family name in the Old Flemish congregations in West Prussia, first mentioned at Schönsee (Sosnovka) in 1695.” Unfortunately, he offers no historical citations of Buller spelled with an umlaut. If they exist, I have not yet seen them.

For the time being, then, the most that we can conclude is that our name was probably pronounced BOO-ler and spelled Buller with or without the apex (Buhler is another possible spelling of the same pronunciation). It is also possible that our name was pronounced BYOO-ler and spelled Büller (or Bueller, as in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). In fact, it is entirely possible that our name was pronounced BOO-ler in some places and at some times and as BYOO-ler in other places and times. Pronunciations are not static, even when names are concerned.

In all likelihood, our name never rhymed with fuller before our family came to the U.S. One wonders if the British pronunciation of the identically spelled but unrelated surname Buller led to our name being pronounced as most of us say it today. Perhaps some other, as yet unrecognized factor came into play. Another question for another day.

Source

Reimer, Gustav. 1953. Buller (Büller) family. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Grandpa’s siblings 2

Peter P and Margaretha’s third child and second daughter was Katharina P, born 1 March 1895. She was baptized 1 June 1914 by Heinrich H. Epp, a minister of the Bethesda Church (for the date of the baptism, see here; to learn more about Heinrich Epp in a two-volume history of York County, see here).

The following year, on 26 August 1915, twenty-year-old Katharina married Dietrich C. Quiring in a ceremony performed by Heinrich Epp. Over the next twenty-one years the Quiring family grew to include eleven children: seven boys and four girls.

Katharina lived to be ninety-six, passing away on 24 October 1991, fifteen years after Dietrich’s death. They are both buried in the Mennonite (Buller–Siebert) Cemetery.

Grandpa’s siblings 1

A series of posts over the next several weeks will offer background on and photographs of most of Grandpa’s eleven brothers and sisters, the children of Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller.

Peter and Margaretha’s first child, also named Peter, was born 10 August 1891 and died eight days later, on 18 August. He is buried in the Mennonite (Buller–Siebert) cemetery.

Less than a year later, on 29 July 1892, Margaretha bore a second child, a daughter likewise named Margaretha. Although we cannot be certain, the photograph below is probably of this daughter. The picture was taken in 1912, when Margaretha would have been twenty; this seems to correspond to what we see in the photo.

Margaretha married Klaas T. Friesen on 27 June 1912 (the same year the photograph was taken) and had one son and three daughters with him.

Like most of our ancestors, Margaretha and Klaas were farmers. Furthermore, as with most of their children, Peter P and Margaretha gave the young couple their start. As shown in the plat map of York County’s Hays Township below, Klaas and Margratha Friesen owned the south half of the southeast quarter of section 6 (the enlarged extract in the center shows section 6).

Note further that Peter P owned the north half of the same section as well as the southwest quarter of the southwest quarter of section 5 at that time (1924). The Farmer’s Directory that accompanies this plat map (see here) states that Klaas and Margratha (sic) rented the two pieces of land owned by Peter P in Hays Township.

Why is this important to note? First, it leads to a correction of an earlier statement, namely, that Peter P and Margaretha farmed 560 acres by 1924 (see here). In fact, Klaas and their daughter Margaretha farmed some of that land (ca. 120 acres), the parcels located in Hays Township.

Second, and more important, this information provides further evidence for Peter P and Margaretha’s practice of acquiring land for their children. In all likelihood, they bought both the south half and the north half of the southeast quarter of section 6, then (as they did with Grandpa and Grandma) gave Klaas and Margaretha 40 acres of the south half and sold them the other 40 acres of the south half. In addition, Peter P and Margaretha rented to Klaas and Margaretha the 120 acres that the parents still owned: the north half of the section 6 property and the 40 acres in section 5 to the east, which were no doubt purchased at the same time. So it was that Peter P and Margaretha took steps to ensure that the landlessness problem that had plagued the family in Molotschna was not repeated in Nebraska.

How long Klaas and Margaretha lived on the farm thus provided we do not know. Margaretha passed away at the age of fifty-two, on 10 November 1944. She is buried alongside Klaas (died 1956) in the Bethesda Cemetery northeast of Henderson (see here).

Peter P and children

No great story here, just a picture of Peter P and six of his twelve children, only ten of whom were alive at this time. Behind Peter P sitting in front, we see (left to right) Elizabeth, Anna, Chris, Peter, Sara, and Maria.

Taking the absence of Peter P’s wife Margaretha Epp Buller from the photograph as an indication that she had already passed away, the picture was taken sometime between late 1951 and the first half of 1964 (when Peter P died), no doubt closer to the latter date than the former.





Stay tuned for additional photographs of Grandpa’s siblings ranging from 1912 to 18 July 1964.

A missing year

The church register from Przekhovka, West Prussia, contains far more than the listing of families who had long been part of the church (discussed here). After the initial collection of family groups (which takes up a little more than the first half of the book), the register switches gears and begins to list persons individually roughly in the order of their birth. The family-based organizational principle disappears for the rest of the book.

Interestingly, the numbering of individuals does not start over with 1 with this new section but rather continues on with the earlier sequence. Thus, the new section begins with number 1196 and goes on from there. For example, page 88 (below) shows numbers 1486 through 1520, from Peter Nachtigal, born on 17 October 1805, through Jacob Wedel (name barely legible), born 6 March 1809.

So, why is this of interest to us? Simple. If David Buller (father of Peter D, grandfather of Peter P, and so on) was born in Przekhovka on 25 November 1817, as the Grandma database and the Buller Family Record both imply, then we would expect to find his name listed in this part of the book. He would not be in the Alexanderwohl, Molotschna, continuation of the book, since the church did not move to Molotschna and found Alexanderwohl until four years after David’s birth, in 1821.

Thumbing through page after page recording birth after birth year by year, one finally arrives at page 100, which records the 1817 births (bottom half of the page):

• Peter Schmidt, 6 February
• Peter Nahtegahl, 12 February
• Cornelius Wilhelm, 5 January
• Maria Unrauin, 23 January
• Maria Bullerin, 7 February
• Maria Könin, 27 February
• Helena Wedelin, 4 March

No David Buller to be found, and the next entry (1678) moves to 21 April 1818 and the birth of Heinrich Ratzlaff. Does this mean that David was not born into this church, that we have been chasing a dead end in thinking that he came from Przekhovka and moved to Alexanderwohl?

Perhaps not. Something odd is going on with the record of births during this period. Notice the gap between 4 March 1817 and 21 April 1818. Can anyone imagine a fecund Mennonite community not having any births at all for a thirteen-month period? Something else must be going on.

Unless someone can find a similar instance of a year-long interruption in births, the only reasonable explanation is that the births continued but the record keeping did not. Maybe the church recorder became incapacitated or simply felt like taking a break. We will probably never know the why, but the what does seem well-established: a little more than a year of Przekhovka’s history is missing from its church register.

What does this mean for our questions about David Buller? There is a truism in archaeology that the absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. That is, the fact that we lack evidence of a given historical claim does not mean that the claim is untrue; all that it means is that we do not yet have the evidence to confirm the claim. Maybe we will never uncover that evidence, but for now, until other evidence indicates otherwise, the most likely explanation remains that David Buller and his family were associated with the Przekhovka church and moved to Alexanderwohl with the rest of the congregation.

Happy birthday, Dad!

Eighty-one years young!

Grandma’s line 4

The first post in this series began with Grandma’s parents; the second moved to her grandparents on her mother’s side and the third one to her grandparents on her father’s side; this one deals with her great-grandparents on her father’s side. Unfortunately, we do not have a photograph of Grandma’s great-grandmother Anna Steingart Peters, so only her great-grandfather Isaac Peters is shown below. To recap, the sequence is Malinda Franz Buller < Isaac G. Franz < Anna Peters Franz < Isaac Peters || Anna Steingart.

Isaac G. Franz

Anna Peters Franz

Reverend Isaac Peters

Grandma’s great-grandmother Anna Steingart (or Steingard or Steingardt) was born 27 September 1825 in the village of Pordenau, Molotschna colony (ca. 15 miles east of Kleefeld in the map here). She was married to Isaac Peters on 11 December 1849 and bore three children by him: Sara, Anna (pictured above; see here), and Isaac. She came to the U.S. on the voyage already mentioned in conjunction with her daughter Anna: the S.S. Vaderland, arriving with Isaac and her three kids in Philadelphia on 26 December 1874. She passed away on 15 December 1902, at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried in the Faith Evangelical Bible Cemetery, one-half mile south of the Henderson golf course.

Reverend Isaac Peters (the designation Reverend was apparently important to him, since it appears on his and his wife’s headstones), husband of Anna Steingart and great-grandfather to Malinda Franz Buller, was a man of some renown. Born on 1 December 1826 in Fürstenau, Molotschna (east of Tokmak in the northeast corner of the colony), he first became a teacher in Fürstenau (1850), then an ordained preacher (1866) and elder (1867) in the Pordenau congregation (the village where Anna was born) (see Epp 1959 for much of what follows).

One of his pupils, Peter M. Friesen, described him as a “stern and ironclad ‘old Mennonite’ in all questions of teaching and doctrine relating to society and the state, but also a man who realize[d] the value of a book, especially of historical and theological works. … [Peters] preached penitence and exercised church discipline in the strictest Mennon­ite sense.” Not everyone in Pordenau appreciated his commitments and teachings, and when a schism erupted in the church Peters and his adherents first were forced to withdraw and then were excommunicated from the congregation.

Peters was well known both for what he believed and what he denied. On the one hand, he rejected immersion as a mode of baptism (most Anabaptists poured water over the candidate’s head instead) and the doctrine of the millennium. On the other hand, he was fiercely committed to nonresistance, which led him to advocate loudly in favor of emigration when the possibility of Mennonites being called into the military arose in the early 1870s. His vocal support of emigration eventually led the Russian government to banish him, which led to his emigration to the U.S. at the end of 1874.

Once here, he and other members of his group joined the Bethesda Mennonite Church in Henderson, where Peters once again was appointed elder. By 1880, however, Peters became disgusted with lax standards of living and lack of discipline in that church, so he and his group withdrew to found a new church: Ebenezer Mennonite Church (organized 5 November 1882). The original church building was erected a mile south of Henderson, thus probably on the same site as the Faith Evangelical Bible Cemetery (aka Ebenezer Cemetery).

During Peters’s tenure as elder at Ebenezer Church (1882–1892) he helped form a new association: the Conference of the United Mennonite Brethren of North America. The conference name was later changed to Defenseless Mennonite Brethren in Christ of North America, then again to Evangelical Mennonite Brethren (EMB). Peters’s conference and church continue to exist, the latter with a new name (Faith Evangelical Bible Church) and a new location within the south part of Henderson (for a fuller account of EMB origins and Ebenezer’s history, see Epp 1953).

Isaac Peters passed away on 10 December 1911 and was laid to rest, not surprisingly, in the Faith Evangelical Bible Cemetery.

Sources

Epp, H. F. 1953. Historical Sketch of the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Conference. Online here.

———. 1959. Peters, Isaak (1826-1911). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Somewhere on these pages …

A recent post explored the possibility (likelihood?) that our family first lived in Alexanderwohl of the Molotschna colony, having emigrated there from Przechovka in the Schwetz region of West Prussia. The post reproduced the title page from the Przechovka church register, which identified Buller as one of the more common last names in the congregation.

Further exploration of the church register reveals that the main Buller section appears on pages 24–29 of the Przechovka register (a different register covers the Alexanderwohl years), a list of more than fifty different Bullers, some with dates of birth, baptism, and death and even cross-references to who married whom.

In all likelihood, somewhere on these pages are the names of the Bullers who preceded David Buller, the first of our Buller line whom we can identify with certainty: Chris > Peter P > Peter D > David. For the time being we cannot know which, or even if any, of these Bullers are in our line, but we can still observe how this church register was set up and discover what type of information was contained within it.

1. The three pages pictured are 24, 26, and 28, all left-hand pages, but each entry actually extended across to the corresponding right-hand page (25, 27, or 29), as in the following example.

2. The Buller list appears from the bottom of page 24 (after the Becker list) through the top half of 28 (before the Cornels list). Obviously, this register is not a running account of births, since individuals are grouped by family (which are arranged, for the most part, in alphabetical order), and the family groups extend across several generations. In other words, this portion of the book is not a running record of births, deaths, and so forth but is an attempt to record in one place all the family data that can be collected from whatever sources were available at the time of its creation (e.g., oral history, family records).

3. Looking more closely at page 26 (the middle one of the group of three) reveals the organization of the record: an ID number, the individual’s first and last names, a set of two ID numbers that represent the person’s father and mother, four columns for the person’s birth data (year, date, ?, village), two columns for the person’s baptism record (year and date), and four columns for the person’s marriage information (year, date, ID number of spouse, village). Right-hand pages (e.g., 27) provide two more sets of four columns for marriages 2 and 3, three columns for death information (year, date, ?), and four columns for the length of life (years, months, days, ?).

For example, toward the bottom of page 26 we see number 370, one David Buller (no, not that David Buller), who is the son of number 352 (Benjamin Buller) and 409 (Maricke Cornelsen, according to that entry later in the record). He was born 10 December 1780 in Klein Konopat (written kl. Konpat, meaning smaller Konopat; presumably there was also a Grosse/greater Konopat); the meaning of the “9 V.” in column 3 is unknown to me. David was baptized on 5 October 1800 but never married. We learn further from page 27 that he died on 17 March 1813 at the young age of 32 years, 3 months, and 7 days. It is remarkable that we can know so much about a commoner who lived and died more than two centuries ago.

4. Comparison of the first half of the Buller list to the second half reveals a significant difference in the amount of information given: the later entries are much more complete than the early entries. For example, the first Buller listed (no. 339) has asterisks in place of the first name, clearly indicating that his first name was not known when the register was composed (around 1790). Likewise, the year of birth is only rarely given for the first twenty entries. Presumably this reflects the compiler’s reliance on collective family memory, rather than written records, for the earliest entries.

5. Of no great significance but still interesting is the fact that the spelling of our last name depends on the gender of the person being named: Buller for males, Bullers for females (see, e.g., nos. 342–349, 379–387). The same phenomenon holds for other surnames, such as Becker and Beckers, Cornels and Cornelsen, and Schmidt and Schmiten. Later in the church register, where additional names are given in order of birth, the female name for Buller is Bullerin. Presumably the alternate spellings reflect the use of grammatical case endings in Low German (i.e., different word-endings to indicate the gender of the word/person).

6. Less significant but even more intriguing is the unexpected use of Hebrew script at the top of page 24. The last entry on page 22, for Berent Becker, is numbered 304; at the top of page 24 is one Anike Beckers, who has the Hebrew letters dalet (right-angle character) and shin (three-pronged character) in place of a number. The name following hers (Peter Becker) is numbered 305, following on from Berent on page 22. One final curiosity is that Berent Becker’s entry identifies his wife with Hebrew script as well: two tavs. What are we to make of all this?

The Hebrew script has no numeric symbols such as 1, 2, and 3, so over time Hebrew letters became used as numbers: dalet is the fourth letter in the alphabet, so it was used for the number 4; shin was used for 300. Add these two together, and one gets 304. Similarly, since a tav is 400, two tavs equal 800. Looking at number 800 in the church register (below) makes it clear what is going on.

The “Hebrew” 800 is inserted between the “regular” 800 and 801—just as the Hebrew 304 appears between the regular 304 and 305. In other words, the Hebrew numbers were used to insert material that came to light sometime after the first numbers had been assigned. The numbering system had to be decided before the actual writing began (cross-referencing spouses demanded it), so when either the compiler or a later editor discovered information that needed to be inserted, he or she needed to use an alternate system. In some cases a letter was added to the regular number (e.g., on page 26 the mother of Peter Buller 354 is 930B = Dina Thomsen); in others, Hebrew letters as numerals. In one sense this is scribal trivia, but in another it reveals a remarkable story: some Mennonite keeper of the register knew enough Hebrew to use the right letters (all written flawlessly) to indicate numbers that were additions to the text. This is, to put it mildly, an impressive level of education.

Somewhere on these pages are the names of our pre-David ancestors (probably), but as we have seen, the pages are interesting in and of themselves. They reveal the values of our ancestors (the important events were birth, baptism, marriage, and death) as well as a little of the struggles and challenges of their lives (mortality was high enough to necessitate columns for second and third marriages). The church register also reveals itself to be an ongoing project, as it is transformed from a static listing of families in the first part to a running list of individuals born into the community in the order in which they were born in the second part. A following post will explore that section of the register further, and later we will turn to the Alexanderwohl book to see what secrets can be gleaned from its pages. It is unlikely that we will learn who David’s parents were, but we will continue to explore, because the search is almost as much fun as the finding.