Further exploration of the church register reveals that the main Buller section appears on pages 24–29 of the Przechovka register (a different register covers the Alexanderwohl years), a list of more than fifty different Bullers, some with dates of birth, baptism, and death and even cross-references to who married whom.
In all likelihood, somewhere on these pages are the names of the Bullers who preceded David Buller, the first of our Buller line whom we can identify with certainty: Chris > Peter P > Peter D > David. For the time being we cannot know which, or even if any, of these Bullers are in our line, but we can still observe how this church register was set up and discover what type of information was contained within it.
1. The three pages pictured are 24, 26, and 28, all left-hand pages, but each entry actually extended across to the corresponding right-hand page (25, 27, or 29), as in the following example.
2. The Buller list appears from the bottom of page 24 (after the Becker list) through the top half of 28 (before the Cornels list). Obviously, this register is not a running account of births, since individuals are grouped by family (which are arranged, for the most part, in alphabetical order), and the family groups extend across several generations. In other words, this portion of the book is not a running record of births, deaths, and so forth but is an attempt to record in one place all the family data that can be collected from whatever sources were available at the time of its creation (e.g., oral history, family records).
3. Looking more closely at page 26 (the middle one of the group of three) reveals the organization of the record: an ID number, the individual’s first and last names, a set of two ID numbers that represent the person’s father and mother, four columns for the person’s birth data (year, date, ?, village), two columns for the person’s baptism record (year and date), and four columns for the person’s marriage information (year, date, ID number of spouse, village). Right-hand pages (e.g., 27) provide two more sets of four columns for marriages 2 and 3, three columns for death information (year, date, ?), and four columns for the length of life (years, months, days, ?).
For example, toward the bottom of page 26 we see number 370, one David Buller (no, not that David Buller), who is the son of number 352 (Benjamin Buller) and 409 (Maricke Cornelsen, according to that entry later in the record). He was born 10 December 1780 in Klein Konopat (written kl. Konpat, meaning smaller Konopat; presumably there was also a Grosse/greater Konopat); the meaning of the “9 V.” in column 3 is unknown to me. David was baptized on 5 October 1800 but never married. We learn further from page 27 that he died on 17 March 1813 at the young age of 32 years, 3 months, and 7 days. It is remarkable that we can know so much about a commoner who lived and died more than two centuries ago.
4. Comparison of the first half of the Buller list to the second half reveals a significant difference in the amount of information given: the later entries are much more complete than the early entries. For example, the first Buller listed (no. 339) has asterisks in place of the first name, clearly indicating that his first name was not known when the register was composed (around 1790). Likewise, the year of birth is only rarely given for the first twenty entries. Presumably this reflects the compiler’s reliance on collective family memory, rather than written records, for the earliest entries.
5. Of no great significance but still interesting is the fact that the spelling of our last name depends on the gender of the person being named: Buller for males, Bullers for females (see, e.g., nos. 342–349, 379–387). The same phenomenon holds for other surnames, such as Becker and Beckers, Cornels and Cornelsen, and Schmidt and Schmiten. Later in the church register, where additional names are given in order of birth, the female name for Buller is Bullerin. Presumably the alternate spellings reflect the use of grammatical case endings in Low German (i.e., different word-endings to indicate the gender of the word/person).
6. Less significant but even more intriguing is the unexpected use of Hebrew script at the top of page 24. The last entry on page 22, for Berent Becker, is numbered 304; at the top of page 24 is one Anike Beckers, who has the Hebrew letters dalet (right-angle character) and shin (three-pronged character) in place of a number. The name following hers (Peter Becker) is numbered 305, following on from Berent on page 22. One final curiosity is that Berent Becker’s entry identifies his wife with Hebrew script as well: two tavs. What are we to make of all this?
The Hebrew script has no numeric symbols such as 1, 2, and 3, so over time Hebrew letters became used as numbers: dalet is the fourth letter in the alphabet, so it was used for the number 4; shin was used for 300. Add these two together, and one gets 304. Similarly, since a tav is 400, two tavs equal 800. Looking at number 800 in the church register (below) makes it clear what is going on.
The “Hebrew” 800 is inserted between the “regular” 800 and 801—just as the Hebrew 304 appears between the regular 304 and 305. In other words, the Hebrew numbers were used to insert material that came to light sometime after the first numbers had been assigned. The numbering system had to be decided before the actual writing began (cross-referencing spouses demanded it), so when either the compiler or a later editor discovered information that needed to be inserted, he or she needed to use an alternate system. In some cases a letter was added to the regular number (e.g., on page 26 the mother of Peter Buller 354 is 930B = Dina Thomsen); in others, Hebrew letters as numerals. In one sense this is scribal trivia, but in another it reveals a remarkable story: some Mennonite keeper of the register knew enough Hebrew to use the right letters (all written flawlessly) to indicate numbers that were additions to the text. This is, to put it mildly, an impressive level of education.
Somewhere on these pages are the names of our pre-David ancestors (probably), but as we have seen, the pages are interesting in and of themselves. They reveal the values of our ancestors (the important events were birth, baptism, marriage, and death) as well as a little of the struggles and challenges of their lives (mortality was high enough to necessitate columns for second and third marriages). The church register also reveals itself to be an ongoing project, as it is transformed from a static listing of families in the first part to a running list of individuals born into the community in the order in which they were born in the second part. A following post will explore that section of the register further, and later we will turn to the Alexanderwohl book to see what secrets can be gleaned from its pages. It is unlikely that we will learn who David’s parents were, but we will continue to explore, because the search is almost as much fun as the finding.
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