Who decided to spell our name Buller?

Not every question can be answered, but that does not mean that such questions should not be asked anyway. For example, it is highly unlikely that we will ever know precisely when the spelling of our family name was changed from Bühler to Buller, let alone why and by whom that decision was made, but asking the question does prompt other interesting questions that lead us to think in new directions, such as the following.

• Were Heinrich and the several generations after him literate?

As we have seen, Mennonite life in nineteenth-century Russia stressed a basic education, but that was a relatively recent phenomenon. During the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries education was limited primarily to the urban well-to-do. It would not be at all surprising, then, if neither Heinrich nor Unknown nor Unknown’s sons were able to write their own names (the definition of literacy for people of this period). The females in the family were even less likely to be literate, since education was extended to them after it became more common among males.

What is the significance of this for the question of the day? If Unknown was illiterate, he was probably not the one who decided to spell the family name Buller.

• Did the pronunciation of our last name change, or did it remain relatively stable while spelling conventions changed?

Since we are unable to go back in time and hear Heinrich and Unknown say our name, we really cannot answer this question. Odds are, however, that it was a little of both. At the very least, we know two things: (1) our name was originally spelled Bühler but later came to be spelled Buller; (2) even after it was spelled Buller, the u in our name was rendered differently, sometimes with no mark over it and sometimes with what might be an apex over it (see further here).

Come to think of it, this prompts yet another question, this one for the aunts and uncles: Did your grandfather Peter P pronounce our name as we do (rhyming with Fuller), or did his pronunciation have more of an oo or ü sound to it? That is, has the pronunciation of our name changed further since we settled in the U.S.?

• If Unknown or the generations around him were illiterate and thus not responsible for the change from Bühler to Buller, who was?

The compilers of the Przekhovka church register would have to be among the chief suspects, although those who created the records from which they drew (assuming that is what happened) are also likely. Perhaps our ancestors purchased houses or land in the community and those who drew up the bills of sale and deeds decided how best to represent what they heard in writing.

We will probably never who is responsible for changing the spelling of our family’s name from Bühler to Buller, but at least asking the question has allowed us to think about our family in some news ways and to understand better their lives in the Vistula River delta during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We so have a lot to learn about the Prussian/Polish period—should be fun!