Taking it a generation back

Recent photos have focused on Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller, moving sort of backward in time: first their sixtieth anniversary in 1950 (here and here), then their 1940 fiftieth anniversary celebration (here), and, finally, a 1929 family photo including, among others, Peter P, Margaretha, and Chris and Malinda Franz Buller (here).

This post continues to step back in time, to the generation preceding Peter P and Margaretha, to the woman pictured below, who has become sort of well known to us.

She was born on 22 August 1847 in an unknown village of the Molotschna colony, then moved with her family to Kleefeld sometime between 1854 and 1857. When she was ten, she attended school in Kleefeld, along with her older brother Cornelius and her younger sister Katharina. Five days after her nineteenth birthday she married and began her own family. So it was that thirteen years later, when she emigrated to the U.S. with the rest of her extended family, she already had two daughters and four sons and was pregnant with yet another son.

The ship manifest does not record her name, simply lists her as “Wife,” but we know her as Sarah Siebert Buller. We previously saw Sarah’s sister Margaretha (Grandma’s grandmother; see here), but now we see Sarah all on her own.

Sarah outlived her husband Peter D by quite a few years: he died in 1897 at the age of fifty-two; she lived to be seventy-four and passed away on 15 February 1922. She is buried alongside Peter D in the Friesen Cemetery a mile and a half west of Henderson—within sight of the farm that she and Peter D established in 1879.