Unknown Buller 1

Recently we discovered that the Buller-with-no-first-name—originally dubbed Old Buller but now referred to as Unknown Buller—is listed in the Grandma database, where we also read a translation and summary of the information provided about him in the Przechovka church register (see here).

This raised a series of questions that we will attempt to answer in turn. The first question is: What were the approximate life dates of Unknown Buller? Our evidence ultimately comes from the church register but is nicely summarized in the Grandma database.

The two scans below show portions of the church register Buller section: first Unknown Buller (listed as *** Buller, number 339), then his younger children.

The dates at the bottom of the first photo are of limited help, since they are associated with Unknown Buller’s grandsons, not him. The second extract provides a few more clues, since it lists a Trudcke Bullers, who was the daughter of numbers 339 and 930B (the 330B should have been corrected, like the first three in the series). In other words, Trudcke was the daughter of Unknown Buller and Dina Thoms.

Looking more closely, we see that her date of birth was 15 June 1702 and that she was married on 6 November 1722 to number 793 (= Michael Schmidt). Based on this bare piece of evidence, we know that Unknown Buller had at least one child in the early years of the eighteenth century. Grandma fills in additional details.

According to Grandma, Trudcke was Unknown and Dina’s eighth and last child. Child four (Peter) was born about 1684, and the three children after him were spaced a little more than three years apart. If Unknown and Dina’s first three children were spaced two years apart, then the first child would have been born sometime around 1678. Assuming that Unknown was twenty to twenty-five when he started a family, he must have been born circa 1653 to 1658.

To put Unknown Buller in historical perspective, he lived roughly thirty-five years after the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower to the New World (there was no U.S. yet) and about a century after Menno Simons broke from the Catholic Church and joined the Anabaptists. In fact, Unknown was closer in time to Menno Simons and the other Reformers (Luther, Calvin) than he was to our ancestor David Buller.

Subsequent posts will explore several other aspects of Unknown Buller’s life, but at least now we have a time and a place (Prussia) to begin.