It’s settled

Not that there is any real doubt about the name of the ship that carried Peter D, Sarah, and family to a new life, but e-copies of the S.S. Switzerland manifest for the voyage ending 24 June 1879 settle the question once and for all.

The National Archives maintains microfilm records of various historical documents, including ship manifests from the heydey of European immigration to the U.S. (see here). Further, anyone can ask the Archives staff to look for a particular immigrant’s name on a given manifest, and they will send (for a nominal fee) an e-copy (jpeg file) of the manifest page, if they are able to find the name.

So it was that several months ago I emailed the National Archives and requested the page(s) for Peter D and Sarah Buller and their six children. I dutifully noted that they had arrived on 24 June 1879 on the S.S. Vaderland. In the meantime, of course, we learned that Peter D and clan did not come to the U.S. on the Vaderland but on the Switzerland, which led me to assume that I would never hear from Archives staff, since I had sent them down a dead end.

Much to my surprise, a CD arrived in the mail this week, and on it I found several pages from the boarding manifest of the S.S. Switzerland (not the Vaderland!) for the voyage that arrived in Philadelphia on 24 June 1879. The first page sent was the first page of the manifest, which documented, among other things, the name of the ship, the port of departure, the port of entry, the tonnage, and the master who recorded the names as passengers boarded the ship: J. B– (?) Andersen.

Archives staff directed my attention to line 543 of the second page sent, which would have been, probably, page 15 of the manifest. There he was: “Peter Buller … 33 [actually, he was thirty-four] … Farmer.” Under the column “To what Country belonging” one reads “Russia”; under “Country of which is their intention to become Inhabit[ants],” “U.S.”

Listed immediately below is “Wife … 30” (Sarah was thirty-one), then their children Johann, Peter [P], David, Cornelius, Cathar., and Sara, followed by Peter D’s brother David. Above the Bullers one sees the end of the Johann Siebert family: Cornelius Siebert, age thirteen (a family’s last name was repeated whenever a new page began); Margar., Anna, and Diedrich. The twenty-three-year-old Margar[etha] listed here, of course, was Malinda Franz Buller’s grandmother (see here).

That is pretty much the rest and the end of the story. Even though we already knew how this part of the Buller story ended, it is still interesting to see the actual documents that record our ancestors’ voyage to the U.S.