Unknown Buller 4 (the in-laws)

The last tidbit of historical information to consider in this series is the statement that Unknown Buller’s father-in-law, Jacob Thoms, lived in Dorposch. Two questions that follow are: Where is Dorposch? When did Jacob Thoms live there?

Answering the first question leads us to begin to learn about the Polish/Prussian period of our family’s history. To start on a macro-level, Dorposch was a village in the Kingdom of Poland. More specifically, Dorposch was located in the southern part of the province named Royal Prussia (to the west of Chełmno [Kulm] in the southern part of the province).

After Jacob Thoms’s birth, around the time that his first grandchildren would have been born to Unknown and Dina, the Kingdom of Poland was partitioned, and most of Royal Prussia was incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia, where it became the province known as West Prussia, one of the ten or more provinces that made up the Kingdom of Prussia (the number varied as the kingdom added new territory and provinces merged together or split into smaller divisions).

At that time (the eighteenth century), most Mennonite residents of Poland/Prussia lived in proximity to the Vistula River (the north–south river in the map above). Jacob Thoms was no exception. His home village of Dorposch (modern Dorposz Chełmiński) was located right on the bank of the Vistula (Polish: Wisła; German: Weichsel; for a larger map of the area, see here). Other nearby villages with Mennonite residents included Jeziorka, Tuchel, and Schönsee, to name just a few.

According to Richard D. Thiessen, Mennonites in Dorposch were associated with the church in Schönsee. He also notes that the 1776 Prussian census lists ten Mennonite families in Dorposch, with the following last names: Block, Gerth, Isaac, Koehn, Nachtigal, Odger, Sparling, and Voht. (The town of Schönsee will merit its own post at some point, since Buller is one of the family names listed on land leases from 1695 and after; see van der Zijpp and Thiessen.)

What significance does this have for our ancestor Jacob Thoms? Because Jacob is not listed in the 1776 Dorposch census, and because he is associated with the Przechovka church (not the Schönsee church, as far as we know), we can probably conclude that he left Dorposch and moved to the Przechovka vicinity (roughly 7 miles away), where he joined the Przechovka church and his daughter Dina met and married Unknown Buller. The rest, as they say, is history.

Source

Thiessen, Richard D. Dorposch (Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

Zijpp, Nanne van der, and Richard D. Thiessen. Schönsee (Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.