School in Molotschna: Kleefeld

The amount of material available online, including raw historical data in the form of transcriptions of government, church, and secular records, is astounding. For example, this site links to various compilations of data relevant to the Mennonite time in Russia, including school attendance records (scroll down to Molotschna Colony > School Registers).

A typical Molotschna school building. In some villages the school met in the same building as the church.
From: http://www.hdremple.com. 

Clicking on the link for the 1857–1858 school registers leads to a page listing the various villages for which records are available for that school year—including Kleefeld. If you recall, Kleefeld is the village where Peter D and family lived before and after living in Alexanderkrone (where Peter P was born in 1869) and from where they emigrated to the U.S. in 1879.

Unfortunately, no Bullers are listed in the Kleefeld school register, which leads one to wonder when David or his son Peter D moved to Kleefeld after the village was established in 1854. I continue to think that Peter D was probably the first of our line to live in Kleefeld, sometime after his marriage to Sarah Siebert in 1866 (more on that below). That would explain the lack of Bullers in the 1857–1858 school register, as well as the fact that David is reported to have died in Waldheim, a village in the northern part of the colony.

But back to the records: to examine the data for yourself, click here. The register lists the students in order of their family’s Wirtschaft (land-holding), that is, in the order in which land was allotted to the founders of the village. Thus one finds Klaas Kroeker’s two kids listed first because Kroeker was the holder of the second Wirtschaft in Kleefeld (see here for the land allotments; presumably the holder of the first Wirtschaft had no school-age children), followed by the children of Michael Plett, holder of the third Wirtschaft.

Of course, this means that the landed families are listed first (kids 1–63), followed by the landless families (kids 64–84). Stated differently, 75 percent of the students came from landed families, 25 percent from landless families. Since we know that most families in the Molotschna colony were landless by this time, one wonders if their children were less likely to attend school.

Copying and pasting the data from the school register into an Excel worksheet, then sorting it in various ways, leads to a number of additional observations about the Kleefeld student body of 1857–1858.

1. The register lists 84 students and gives the ages for 77 of them. Students ranged from six years old to thirteen. This is consistent with the practice in other villages, which offered grades 1 to 7 or 8.


2. Whether through chance or design, the younger classes were larger than the older ones, with the classes of six- and nine-year-olds including 13 each and the class of twelve-year-olds having only 4 and the thirteen-year-olds only 6. 


3. In terms of gender, the student body was evenly divided, with 42 girls and 42 boys. However, one observes a shift in gender balance from the younger to the older grades. Girls are clearly in the majority in the first four grades (28 girls to 18 boys) but in the minority in the last four grades (11 to 20). This may be due to nothing more than random distribution, but it raises the question whether a girl’s responsibilities shifted from school to elsewhere (e.g., helping with young children in the home) earlier than a boy’s responsibilities shifted.


4. Some kids have comments accompanying their records. Thus six-year-old Peter Quiring will forever be known as “not capable.” More interesting are the notations of children who either moved to or away from Kleefeld during the year (or for whom a first day of school is listed): 11 of the 84 kids moved in or out during the year, that is, 13 percent of the student body.
   Not surprisingly, all but one of the kids who moved during the school year came from a landless family. What is surprising is that nearly half of the kids from landless families (10/21) moved during the middle of this single school year. This reflects a level of transience that one might not have expected from mid-nineteenth-century villagers. It also may put into perspective Peter D’s later moves from Kleefeld to Alexanderkrone to Kleefeld within the space of four years.


5. The 84 students of Kleefeld school came from 41 different families. Contrary to common notions of Mennonite family size, most came from families of three or fewer school-age children: 15 kids are the only member of their immediate family in school; 14 are from two-member families; 10 are from three-member families; one family has 5 children in school at the same time (ages six to eleven), and one has 6 kids (six to twelve). 


6. The age difference between kids from the same family is nearly four years for two-member families and nearly two years between each child of the three-member families. This range is comparable to what one sees in the Peter D generation of Bullers, where kids are generally two or three years apart, although sometimes only a year separates kids.


7. The most noticeable difference between the Kleefeld data and Buller records is in the size of the families. Only 2 of the 44 families had more than three children in school at any one time, whereas the Bullers of Peter D’s generation averaged 8.8 kids who lived to school age per family. Granted, not all of those kids would have been in school at the same time; however, more than two or three of them would have been school age (six to thirteen) at the same time. Did our Buller ancestors generally have larger families than their neighbors? Did only certain kids from a family attend school? (I see no evidence for that.)

By the way, the Kleefeld school register offers one final piece of interesting information. Student 49 is one Sarah Siebert, ten-year-old daughter of Johann Siebert. We will never know for certain, but it seems probable that this is the Sarah Siebert who nine years later married Peter D Buller. Sarah was born 22 August 1847, which would have made her ten during the 1857–1858 school year, and one online genealogical website lists her father as Johann (see here).

So, it appears that one of our forebears can be documented as living in Kleefeld, and perhaps this also explains why Peter D ultimately called that village home. Although Johann Siebert was not one of the original 1854 founders of Kleefeld, he was owner of a full land allotment by the late 1850s, when Sarah attended school, and presumably continued to hold a land allotment through the 1860s. Perhaps Peter D moved to Kleefeld not only to be close to his wife’s family but also to work on his father-in-law’s farm and thereby provide for his own family.

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The Bullers in Molotschna series will continue as soon as possible. Hope you didn’t mind this detour in the meantime!