Searching online for “Heinrich Buller” and “Bruetisellen” returns about a dozen meaningful sites. Most of them repeat the same information as the Grandma entry, the ultimate source of which is unspecified anywhere.
1. Heinrich’s date of death is sometimes given as “about” 1615; Grandma, however, merely states that his death was “after” 1615. Grandma, it appears, is being careful not to say more than we know: the actual date of Heinrich’s death is unknown, but it must have been after 1615, which is apparently when Heinrich and family moved to the Przechovka church area.
However, this ambiguity obscures one of the difficulties with the claim that Heinrich and Unknown were father and son. Specifically, one genealogy resource lists Unknown as Heinrich’s son and gives Unknown’s year of birth as 1635 (see here). Granting that 1635 is indeed “after” 1615, so that there is no direct contradiction between the two claims, this scenario seems unlikely for several reasons: (a) If Unknown was actually born in 1635, his father Heinrich would have been fifty-five at the time. Fathering a child at this age is, of course, entirely possible, but it would have been unusual within that historical context. (b) If Unknown was indeed born in 1635, his last child Trudcke (see here) would have been born when he was sixty-seven (in 1702). Again, possible but not likely.
The most reasonable explanation of the dates and other information that we have is that Heinrich and Unknown were not father and son, that one or two generations lay between them. So, for example, one might posit a scenario in which Heinrich was actually Unknown’s great-grandfather. The dates and relations would look something like this:
- Heinrich, born 1580 and married 1598, had a son (X Buller) around 1605 >
- X Buller, born around 1605 and married around 1625, had a son (Y Buller) around 1635 >
- Y Buller, born around 1635 and married around 1655, had a son (Unknown) around 1655 >
- Unknown, born around 1655 and married around 1680, fathered children until 1702
Such a reconstruction would solve a host of complications, such as Heinrich’s date of death about or after 1615, the apparent evidence that some Buller was born in 1635, and the certainty that Unknown fathered a daughter as late as 1702. This is entirely speculative, of course, but it is likely closer to the truth than the idea that Unknown was Heinrich’s son.
2. All the sources agree that Heinrich was born in Switzerland. This fits well with earlier indications that the Buller family originated in Switzerland, not the Netherlands.
One should recall, for example, that name Buller was attested in the Bern, Switzerland, archives for the year 1684 and that the variant Bühler was recorded as early as 1525 (see here for the post). In addition, Adalbert Goertz concludes that Buller, among other names, has a “Silesian-Bavarian-Swiss flavor” (1976, 240; see further here).
What is noteworthy in this case is that we are told the exact Swiss village in which Heinrich lived before he left his homeland: Brüttisellen. At some point in the past that village was combined with another to form Wangen-Brüttisellen, which today has a population of nearly eight thousand. The village is a mere 6 miles to the northeast of Zurich. This certainly will be something to investigate further in future posts.
 |
| Wangen-Brüttisellen today. |
3. The sources also agree on the place of Heinrich’s death: Deutsch Konopat in the Schwetz district of Prussia. An earlier post mentioned a village by the name of Klein Konopat (see here). What is in view here is the larger composite village, which was made up of Klein Konopat and Groß Konopat, that is, Lesser Konopat and Greater Konopat.
We will discuss both villages in greater detail in the near future. For now it suffices to note that the Mennonite residents of both Greater and Lesser Konopat were members of the Przechovka church whose register we have examined a number of times and that they gathered in this area of Prussia in order to escape religious persecution in their homelands.
Although many questions remain unanswered, we have already learned a great deal. Assuming that Heinrich Buller is in our ancestral line (a safe assumption, I think), we know that our family comes from Switzerland, not the Netherlands, as is commonly thought. In addition, our family can trace its involvement in the Anabaptist/Mennonite movement nearly to the very beginning, to at least the first generation after Menno Simons (if not earlier). Although not all the lines are filled in (the connection between David Buller and his forebears in the Przechovka church continues to elude us), we can trace out roots back over four centuries, to the birth of Heinrich in a Swiss village named Brüttisellen.
Source
Goertz, Adalbert. 1976. The Marriage Records of Montau in Prussia for 1661–1704. MQR 50:240–50.
No comments:
Post a Comment