The long view

Since we have now surpassed four hundred years of Buller (and Bühler) history, it might be helpful to take a step back and look at how all the pieces of our family history, both those known and those believed to be true, fit together. We start with the inspiration for this blog: Grandpa and Grandma.

1. Chris and Malinda Franz Buller were both born in 1906 and lived their entire lives in Nebraska.

2. Chris’s father, Peter P, came to the Henderson area when he was ten, in 1879. He was born in the village of Alexanderkrone in Molotschna, a Mennonite colony in New Russia (now Ukraine).

3. Peter P’s father, Peter D, was born in Molotschna colony in 1845. The village of his birth is not known but is likely to have been Waldheim. Peter D accompanied his wife Sarah Siebert’s family from Kleefeld to Henderson in 1879.

4. Peter D’s father, David, lived most of his life in Molotschna and died there, a landowner in the village of Waldheim. According to the Buller Family Record, David’s family moved to Russia when he was between the ages of three and five. He was born in Prussia in 1817, presumably to a family of Bullers in the Przechovka church.

Vistula River near Przechovka (modern Przechówko)

His father is not known, and it is not entirely certain that he is related to Bullers in the Przechovka church. However, several lines of evidence favor this conclusion: (a) David’s family emigrated to Molotschna between 1820 and 1822, which is the time frame of the Przechovka church’s emigration from Prussia to Molotschna; (b) the Przechovka church book skips over the year of David’s birth, which would explain why he does not appear in the book; (c) all the Bullers who entered Molotschna during the 1820–1822 period apparently came from the Przechovka church (other Bullers, e.g., from Hierschau, came roughly fifteen years later).

The weight of evidence, then, supports the conclusion that David’s father (and grandfather and great-grandfather and so on) were members of the Przechovka church and are listed in that church’s record of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths.

5. Five or six generations (ca. 160 years) before David lived his ancestor whose first name is not (yet) known: Unknown Buller. He was born in the Przechovka area of Prussia, in the Vistula River delta, probably sometime in the 1653–1658 time frame. Unknown married Dina Thoms, whose family had come to Prussia from Moravia.

6. Heinrich Bühler lived at least two, possibly three generations before Unknown. Born around 1580 in Brüttisellen, 6 miles northeast of Zurich, Switzerland, Heinrich emigrated to the Polish province of Royal Prussia sometime after 1614, ultimately settling in the village of Deutsch Konopat, where he died (date unknown).

Now that we have traced our line back as far and as fully as possible (maybe someday we will draw the line from David to his father, grandfather, and so on), we are ready to fill in some details about our earliest known ancestor, Heinrich, who actually was quite notorious among certain circles in the early 1600s.