Polish/Prussian Bullers: background

The Buller family history, like most other family histories, is very much a tangled mess of similar-looking but separate threads. We know which thread we want to follow—that of David Buller (father of Peter D, grandfather of Peter P, and great-grandfather of Grandpa Chris)—but the deeper we dig into the tangle, the more confounding and confusing it all becomes. There is no clear way to trace the one thread that interests us systematically back in time.

Rather, we must approach the task much as we would a storage room stuffed with the accumulations of life over a number of years. To clean out such a room, to bring order to it, we first create a bigger mess as we drag out and pile up different categories of items: clothes for Goodwill here, books for the local library there, kitchen gadgets over there, and all those things that we should have thrown away years ago in the dumpster sitting in the driveway.

With those two images in mind—our family history as a mess of threads that need to be untangled and as a storage room that can be cleaned out only by creating an even bigger mess—let us begin to sort out what we know about our family’s existence in Poland/West Prussia during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.

To set the stage for the messiness to follow, I ask you to indulge one last rehearsal of some of the basic geographical and historical facts that will be in the background of many of our discussions.

1. The area of our interest is located modern-day Poland, from the Baltic Sea in the north, down the Vistula River basin to the south. For the most part, Mennonites in Poland (there were Mennonites in other countries and regions) lived in the area shown below.

Our specific interest will often focus on the area south of Świecie (German Schwetz), which is identified by the arrow left of center in the map above. This is not only where most Mennonite Bullers lived; it is also where our Bullers lived. For a more detailed map of this area, see here.

2. We do not need to know a great deal of history to explore our family history, but it is helpful to keep in mind that our Bullers first lived within the Kingdom of Poland but then, in 1772, became a part of the Prussian kingdom of Frederick II. This change in political rule did not entail immediate changes, but eventually it created the conditions that led our family and many other Mennonites to leave West Prussia for Catherine the Great’s New Russia.

3. In addition to geography and history, it will be useful to remind ourselves of a genealogical fact, that the earliest known (that is, earliest documented) Buller in the Schwetz area was the *** Buller listed in the Przechovka (pronounced pshe-KHOF-ka) church register.

Unknown Buller, as previously discussed here, was probably born sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps in the 1650–1660 range. At present, this is the earliest recorded Buller we have for the area, possibly for all of Poland (we will have to explore further before we can confirm the latter). Although certainty will not be possible, we will work from the hypothesis that the Przechovka-area Bullers listed in land leases and other historical documents after 1660 probably are descendants of Unknown Buller and his wife Dina Thoms.

 Now that we have set the broad background of the geographical, historical, and genealogical context, we are ready to dive into the mess of details about Bullers in Poland/West Prussia during the period 1650–1820, that is, from the early days of Unknown Buller until David Buller and family emigrated to Molotschna colony in Russia.