Unknown Buller 3

In our series on the questions surrounding Unknown Buller (Grandma 32675), we have tackled the question of when he lived (ca. 1653–sometime in the early 1700s; see here) and what it means that the family name first appeared in conjunction with him (probably that there were no records before him or that the name was first spelled Buller rather than Bühler with him; see here).

This post turns to another enigmatic statement in the Przechovka, Prussia, church register, namely, that “all the Bullers are descendants of this family.” What might this statement mean? As with the earlier question, several possibilities come to mind.

1. All Bullers (as opposed to Bühlers?) descended from this family.


2. All Bullers and Bühlers originated with this single family.


3. All Bullers in the Przechovka church descended from this family.

Before we sort through the various possibilities, it is important to note precisely what is said and what is not said. The statement is that “all the Bullers are descendants of this family,” not that “all the Bullers are descendants of this man,” that is, Unknown Buller.

This opens the possibility that the church register reflects knowledge of one or more generations before Unknown, perhaps stretching back to Heinrich (born ca. 1580).

Of course, that is not the only possible interpretation. The compilers of the register may simply be focusing first on the family, then on Unknown as the head of the family. The full register statement, which switches decisively from the family to the individual after the second sentence, allows for this possibility:

This is the first time that this family name appears. All the Bullers are descendants of this family. His given name and original residence are not known. He died at a very old age. The only information about his marital status is a notation found with No. 930B and No. 339. This indicates that he was married to Jacob Thomsen’s daughter, Dina, and that she survived him.

Regardless of what we make of the reference to the family as opposed to the person Unknown Buller, the suggested explanations are worth examining.

1. If the meaning of the Buller comment in the church register is that the spelling Buller began with Unknown (see here), then presumably that would apply to this statement as well: all those who use the spelling Buller (rather than Bühler) descend from this family (which was headed by Unknown). As far as we can tell at this point, the statement would be true. The spelling Bühler was used at least by Heinrich, and Unknown is the first attested use of the spelling Buller.

2. If the point of the comment is that all Bullers and Bühlers derive from this family, then we would have to say that the compilers of the register were mistaken, since the Bern archives have a reference to a Bühler in 1525 (see here), which would predate Unknown by 125 years and Heinrich by at least 55 years. Tying that individual to “this family” seems a bit too far to stretch.

3. The statement may be far more limited in scope than the first two possibilities assume, claiming only that all the Bullers in the Przechovka church, who are about to be listed, derive from this one family (which was headed by Unknown). If this is the intended meaning, then all that the compilers are saying is that during the time of Unknown there were not multiple Buller families in the church; there was only one family of Bullers in the church, and every Buller in the church descended from that family and their heads: Unknown and his wife Dina Thoms Buller.

In the end, we cannot know which of these explanations is correct (if any of them), but the third does seem the most plausible. The compilers of the Przechovka church register were about to list a number of Bullers—more than fifty of them—and to make matters as clear as possible they began by noting that all of those Bullers were from a single family, the descendants of a single couple.

Of course, this raises another question: Why would the compilers feel a need to do this? If there were no other Buller families in the church, why make a point of noting it? Only one answer makes sense: there had been other Buller families in the church previously.

Ready to step out into speculation? … We know that Heinrich Bühler and his family were the first of our family to settle in the Przechovka area (see here). Odds are that he had a number of children, just like all other Mennonite families. Furthermore, his children also had children, so that the Przechovka church likely had multiple Buller families associated with it. What happened to them? Why are they not listed alongside Unknown and Dina? Did they abandon the church? move back to Switzerland? perhaps move somewhere else … maybe to Volhynia?

If you recall, an earlier post noted that groups of Mennonites relocated from Prussia to Volhynia beginning in the last decade of the 1700s, roughly the same time that the Przechovka church register was compiled (see here and here; see also Schrag 1959). We also discovered that Buller was among the most common family names of Karolswalde, the earliest Volynian Mennonite village (Crous 1857).

Putting all these pieces together, it is not difficult to imagine what happened and why the compilers of the church register stated that “all the Bullers are descendants of this family.” In all likelihood, there were multiple Buller families in the Przechovka during most of the 1700s. However, during the last decade of the century, all but one of them moved from the Przechovka area to Volhynia. Only Unknown and Dina and their children remained in the Przechovka church. Since the compilers and their readers knew that there had been multiple Buller families in the church, the compilers added a comment to make it abundantly clear that all the Bullers in the church register descended from this one family. The statement was not a grandiose claim that all Bullers of every time and every place descended from Unknown and Dina; it merely intended to clarify that the Bullers about to be listed all descended from the one family that had stayed in Przechovka rather than moving to Volhynia.

Three tough questions down, one easier one to go … before we explore the life of Heinrich in more detail.

Sources

Crous, Ernst. 1957. Karolswalde (Rivne Oblast, Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.