Father’s Day

It was this time a year ago that the idea for the Buller Time blog came to mind, and even though the posting has been embarrassingly sporadic and slim the past two months, we are not done yet. So, in celebration of not only a year of Buller Time (the first post was published here on 15 June 2014) but also of being and having a father, I offer the following rambling thoughts.

One of the early posts had to do with the 2014 Buller reunion (here). This year’s reunion is just six days away, on 27 June. I understand that there will be family from California and Wyoming, along with a nice representation from Nebraska. For further information, see here or contact Steve directly.

This is a blog for the entire Buller family, but I hope you will indulge me for a moment and allow me to send love to those who made me a proud father and an indulgent grandfather: Brooke, Taylor, and Payten. The photo below was taken in Estes Park, Colorado, the day after Christmas 2014.

Without our fathers, both Bullers and those with other last names, there would be no Buller family and certainly no Buller Time blog. I wish I had photographs of all the fathers in our family, but I do not, so I hope it will be adequate to post a few representative photographs of the fathers we honor today and every time we remember who we are.

We begin with Grandpa and his boys (left to right: Wayne, Carl, Daniel), in a photograph taken in 1940. For further details regarding the location and circumstances, see here.

Before Grandpa, of course, was his own father: Peter P. Below we see Grandpa and Grandma (and Matilda) on the right of the photograph, with Peter P and Margaretha two places to the left.

Unfortunately, we have not yet uncovered a photograph of Peter P’s father (Peter D) or grandfather (David), but maybe someday some Buller will find those treasures in a long-forgotten album or a box of neglected pictures. Until then, we end with a non-Buller father who played a vital role in bringing our family from Kleefeld, Molotschna colony, to Lushton, Nebraska: Johann Siebert—also known as Peter D’s father-in-law. For the full story of his fatherly service, see here.

To all our fathers past and present, thank you for making our family what it is. To my own dad, well, this blog’s for you.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton recap

Since mid-February we have been walking (some might say crawling) our way forward from what we think (!) is the Bullers’ earliest known location, a small village outside of Zurich named Brüttisellen. Through a series of seven posts we traveled over 850 miles over the course of roughly two decades in the life of Heinrich Bühler, before arriving in a small village named Deutsch Konopat in the Vistula River delta. The list below links directly to the individual posts. If you prefer a condensed version, see the brief recap below the list.

• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 1
• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 2
• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 3
• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 4
• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 5
• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 6
• From Brüttisellen to Lushton 7

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 1
Heinrich Bühler, born sometime around 1580, lived for a part of his life in the village pictured to the right: Brüttisellen. When he was in his early twenties, he joined the Anabaptist branch of the Protestant Reformation, eventually journeying 450 miles east to a Hutterite Bruderhof in Moravia.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 2
Heinrich’s move to Moravia was motivated by severe persecution of all Anabaptist groups by the state church of Switzerland, the Reformed Church. Although Heinrich fled persecution alongside other Anabaptists, he was different in one important respect: he belonged to a Hutterite community that practiced a sort of communal living and the holding of all possessions in common rather than individually.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 3
Heinrich was not just any Hutterite, in fact; he was a fearless missionary who traveled back to Zurich four times in twelve years in hopes of winning new converts to the Hutterite faith and life. In 1614 he was imprisoned in Zurich’s Wellenberg tower in the middle of the Limmat River and threatened with even worse punishment if ever he showed his face in Zurich again.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 4
So it was that Heinrich returned to his Bruderhof in Wessely, Moravia, on the banks of the March (now Moravou) River, on the border between Moravia and Hungary.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 5
It is likely that Heinrich tended grape vines during his time at Wessely, since he had told the Zurich authorities that that was his trade.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 6
Unfortunately, Heinrich’s peaceful life did not last long, and his world burst into flames with the onset of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. The troops of the Holy Roman Empire (Catholic) and those of the Bohemian and Austrian nobles (Protestant) warred back and forth across Moravia, leaving a scorched earth in their wake. In early 1621 the emperor’s troops burned Wessely  to the ground. When and how and where Heinrich escaped we can only guess.

From Brüttisellen to Lushton 7

We presume that Heinrich and family moved north approximately 400 miles to a village near the Vistula River: Deutsch Konopat, which is where we will pick up the story with the next installment of From Brüttisellen to Lushton.

In the meantime, let’s return to a question that has been left hanging for over a month: In the map below, what are the close-set parallel lines southeast of Deutsch Konopat, northeast of Culm, and elsewhere?

Perhaps the satellite photo below will clarify.

Or maybe we need to zoom in a little, maybe even go to ground-level:

In fact, the close-set parallel lines on the old map are the boundaries of narrow strip fields, some of which remain even today. Although we may think of farmland being divided into 160-acre squares, this was certainly not the case in Europe. In both West Prussia (Poland) of the seventeenth century and the Molotschna colony of the nineteenth century, fields were no more than narrow strips of land. More on this later!