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.