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.