David Buller’s birth and death

Earlier this year we worked through four letters submitted to the Mennonitische Rundschau that provided contemporary information about the death—and, by extension, the birth—of David Buller (see here). We concluded at that time that the Buller Family Record, whose entry on David appears below, is incorrect with regard to several key facts.

1. David actually died on 12 November 1904, not 25 September of the same year. We do not know if the 12 November date is given according to the Gregorian calendar (which was still in use in Russia at that time) or the Julian calendar (the calendar used in the U.S. in 1904 and even now). If, as seems most likely, the 12 November date is given according to the Gregorian calendar, then his date of death according to our calendar was 25 November 1904. (It is hard to know if 25 November appearing in the BFR as his date of birth is an odd coincidence or evidence that the date was actually remembered but mistakenly assigned to the wrong event.)

2. The Rundschau letters agree that David lived 86 years and 10 months. Notice that the length of his life in the BFR is exactly that: 86 years and 10 months to the day. This correspondence is probably not coincidental; rather, it likely reflects knowledge or some family memory of the length of his life. Unfortunately, because that knowledge was applied to a faulty premise (that David was born on 25 November 1817), it resulted in an erroneous date of death.

3. The two facts about which we are certain (when David died and how long he lived) enable us to derive the one fact that we lack: when David was born. If, as seems most likely, David passed away on 25 November 1904, and if he lived exactly 86 years and 10 months (another assumption with high probability), then he was born on 25 January 1818. Even if that was not the exact date, it is not too far off from the actual date, probably within at least two weeks.

Countryside several miles southwest of Rovno (Rivne).

4. When we put our knowledge of the time of David’s birth together with the information contained in the Rovno register of Mennonites, we can now also deduce the place of David’s birth. Benjamin and Helena Buller moved from Prussia to Volhynia sometime in 1817 (see the previous post). Because David was born in January 1818, we know that he must have been born in the Rovno district of Volhynia—just like his future wife Helena Zielke.

As it turns out, the Buller Family Record contains more misinformation about David than accurate information. David was born in Volhynia (not Prussia) on 25 January 1818 (not 25 November 1817); he moved to Russia (Molotschna) when he was around the age of twenty (not when he was three to five); and he died on 25 November 1904 (not 25 September of the same year). The only facts that the BFR has correct are David’s marriage to Helena and their deaths in Russia.

This new information also allows us to tie up a loose end. In late 2014 we noted that the Przechovka church book was missing a year’s worth of entries, specifically births between 4 March 1817 and 21 April 1818 (see here). Since David was born during that time period, it seemed reasonable to think that his name does not appear in the church book due to this gap. Knowing what we now know, we have to admit that that is not at all the explanation. David is not recorded in the church book because he was not born anywhere close to the Przechovka church. He was born roughly 450 miles away, in the Rovno district of Volhynia.

The fact that his birth corresponds to the gap in the church book is an interesting coincidence—and a reminder that we need to be careful whenever we form conclusions based on a lack of contradictory evidence. As tempting as it is to fill in the many gaps in our knowledge based on logic and reason, in the end we truly know only what we can actually document. Based on the Rovno register and the Rundschau letters, we now know with certainty a great deal about David. We will continue to explore further in our journey back into our family history.

Bullers in Rovno 1

We begin our exploration of the “Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820” (Chaiderman 1997) at the macro-level. Thus, looking at the three pages of the file posted here, we notice that the list comprises eighteen families with a total of ninety persons (forty-four males and forty-six females).

Looking specifically at the Comments column, we also see that the families are grouped together in terms of when they moved to Volhynia (generally):

• Families 1–10 left Prussia in 1810 and settled in the Rovno district in 1811.
• Family 11 left Prussia in 1816 and settled in Volhynia that same year.
• Family 12 left Prussia much earlier (1799) but did not settle in the Rovno district until 1817.
• Families 13 and 14 do not have a migration date listed, only their residency in the same location.
• Families 15–18 are said to have left Prussia in 1807 and settled in Volhynia the same year. 

Before we go any further, we need to correct an error in the translation. The listing for families 15–18 states that they settled in Volhynia in 1807, but that is incorrect; those families settled in the Rovno district of Volhynia ten years later, in 1817. When we look at scans of the register, it is easy to see how the translator made this mistake.

The year listed in the explanatory column for families 15–18 does look like 1807 at first glance. However, closer inspection of the date and comparison with another entry in the register call that reading into question.

Looking carefully at the enlarged scan to the right, we can see that the the last three numbers are written cursively, that is, not individually but linked together. Because of this style of writing, the numeral after the 8 resembles a 0, but it is actually a 1 that is joined to the 8 preceding and the 7 that follows.

Based on this observation, we can regard it as more likely than not that the year recorded was 1817, not 1807. Comparison with a date written in another part of the Rovno register confirms the 1817 reading.

The scan to the left shows a portion of the explanatory column for family 12. In line 5 we see exactly the same date as that written for families 15–18. (If you are curious as to what family 12 was doing all those years in between, the explanation notes that they first lived in the Ostrog district of Volhynia, then moved from there to Rovno.)

In this case the translator has (correctly) read the date as 1817, which really leaves little doubt about when families 15–18 settled in Rovno. It was 1817, not 1807.

Why should we care about such a minor matter? Recall that Benjamin and Helena Buller are family 18 in the list, so it is a matter of getting the facts of our family history correct. Based on this primary source, this piece of contemporary archival evidence, we know that David Buller and the rest of his immediate family moved from Prussia to Volhynia, to the Rovno district, to be exact, in the year 1817.

I am afraid that the Buller Family Record has it incorrect. David did not move to Russia (by which the BFR means Molotschna colony) when he was three to five years old. At that time he was living in Volhynia (which technically was Russia); he did not move to Molotschna until many years later, 1836 at the earliest but probably sometime after that.

With this new understanding of the beginning of David’s life in hand, we now want to go to the end of David’s life and revisit what we were told in the Mennonitische Rundschau articles that reported his death. My hunch is that we will uncover another mistake in the Buller Family Record, one that is also repeated in the Grandma database. Stay tuned!

Source

Chaiderman, Sergei, trans. 1997. Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820. Posted by Richard D. Thiessen on the Mennonite Genealogy website. Available online here.

Benjamin and Helena Buller

The previous post only began to scratch the surface of a remarkable discovery: the names of David Buller’s father and mother. You can rest assured that we will explore a variety of questions that arise from this new information and the documentation that contains it. For the moment, however, we need to be clear just exactly what the previous post revealed.

By now many of you are no doubt able to trace our line back from Grandpa Chris to David Buller, so adding in the new information will be relatively simple: Benjamin and Helena were David’s parents. Thus our line now looks like this (moving backward in time):

		Chris || Malinda
		|
		Peter P || Margaretha
		|
		Peter D || Sarah
		|
		David || Helena
		|
		Benjamin || Helena

Since the register was written in 1819 or 1820 and Benjamin was thirty-one at that time, he must have been born in 1788 or 1789; his wife Helena was six years younger, so she was born in 1794 or 1795.

The fact that David’s father was named Benjamin explains why David and Helena gave one of their sons the same name (Benjamin D, who married Anna Reimer and came to the U.S. on the same ship as Peter D. and family!). The name Benjamin appears in the next generation as well, as Peter P and Margaretha’s second-born son (Grandpa Chris’s older brother).

Not to be lost in the excitement of the discovery of David’s parents is the fact that we now know a great deal more about David’s wife Helena as well. For example, her father was named Jacob Zielke, and her mother was Maria. Helena’s father was born circa 1785, her mother around 1773. We also know that Helena Zielke was, in 1819 or 1820, the fifth child in her family. Finally, and perhaps most important, we now know that Helena was about a year younger than David, so she was born in 1818 or 1819.

Now that we have the basic facts of David’s and Helena’s parents in place, we are ready to explore further the list that records their names and location. As mentioned previously, Richard D. Thiessen has made the list publicly available here. You may want to bookmark or download the file; we will be referring to it frequently over the course of the next posts.

His name was Benjamin

Russian State Historical Archives in St. Petersburg

Several days ago Richard D. Thiessen posted a document online that Mennonite historian and genealogist Glenn Penner had earlier alerted me to with the comment, “I think you’ll find this interesting,” an understatement if ever there was one. The document is a translation of a file housed in the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (Russian State Historical Archives).

The English translation has been given the title “Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820.” The words Mennonites and Volhynia stand out as having special relevance for us Bullers and leave little doubt that this is a trail worth following.

The register was compiled, as indicated by the title, around 1819–1820 (certainty on the date eludes us), so roughly sixteen years before some Volhynian Mennonites began packing up their belongings to move and found the village of Waldheim in Molotschna colony. The register lists, according to the title, the names of some Mennonites who lived in the Rovno district. As indicated in the earlier post on the geography of Volhynia (see here), this district was in the center-north part of the region.

The document records, according to translator Sergei Chaiderman’s précis, “the religious background of the Mennonites; the number of people, both male and female, if they have signed a contract with the landowner; the amount they pay for the rent to the landowner and the amount of taxes they pay to the government fund.”

As seen in the scan below (provided by Glenn Penner), the register is laid out family by family, with the male head of household and his age given first, followed (usually) by his wife and her age, and then male children with their ages, female children and their ages, and other members of the household (e.g., mother-in-law, nephew).

So, for example, without even knowing the names of family 1 below, we can deduce that the husband was thirty-three and his wife forty-seven (presumably not her first marriage), and the family included a son aged seven and three daughters, ages sixteen, nine, and one. Family 2 included a fifty-three-year-old husband, a thirty-year-old wife, and a two-year-old child. The register continues in the same general pattern through eighteen different families, ninety people in all.

The register is composed in Russian (not surprisingly) in a cursive form of the Cyrillic/Russian alphabet. Some of the letters are recognizable to English speakers, such as the D under the top arrow and the A under the bottom arrow. In fact, I suspect that most readers can make out the name of the nine-year-old girl in family 1. However, most of the letters in the list are difficult, if not impossible, for anyone not experienced with Russian handwriting to decipher.

Given the differences between some letters of our Latin alphabet and corresponding ones in the Cyrillic alphabet, it would not be unusual for English speakers to stare at their own family name for several minutes without even realizing it—which is exactly what we have been doing. In fact, the surname of family 2 is Buller. Without going too deep into the weeds, let’s explore this a little further.

Before we do so, however, we must remind ourselves that in 1819 there was no correct or authorized spelling of the Buller name. It could be spelled however it sounded to the person writing, in this case presumably a Russian government official charged with keeping track of immigrants and especially of the amount of taxes they might owe.

Leaving aside the first name (which is Andrei or Andrey = Andreas), we will focus our attention on the second. Although we might expect to see a character resembling B (for Buller) at the beginning, the Cyrillic В-looking character corresponds to our v; in Cyrillic, what we think of as B/b is represented by Б, which is evident in the cursive form above.

The у character that follows is our u (like upsilon in Greek), and the tiny loop after that is an e. Thus far we have Bue-.

The letter l seems fairly evident, as does the tiny loop of an e that follows. But what about all the extra marks at the end?

Notice that both the first and last names have the same letter with a long descender, as we have with our letter p. As in Greek, that letter form in Cyrillic stands for our letter r. The final cluster that is set apart from the r is, as far as I can tell, the archaic letter ъ (yer), a sign used to indicate that the preceding consonant is hard; since it has no phonological value, it is not transcribed.

Putting this all together, we read the surname Bueler (or Russian Буелер) for family 2, Buller in our current spelling. Amazing as it is to see our family name on a Russian archival document from the early nineteenth century, that isn’t even the best part.

As noted above, Richard D. Thiessen has posted the entire register online for everyone to consult, available here. At the bottom of the first page (family 5) one encounters the Jacob Tzlivk family. I am told that Tzlivk is a variant spelling of what we know as Zielke (remember that the person recording the name simply wrote what he heard). Reading down through the list of names one sees Jacob and Maria followed by their five children: Johan, Friedrich, Maria, Katherina, and Helena.

Helena? Yes, Helena Zielke, age one in 1819–1820. Let that sink in for a moment. Here we have the earliest record of a direct ancestor, the future mother of Peter D Buller and his many descendants. Helena Zielke was in Volhynia, and according to the register her family had been there since 1811, which means that Volhynia is where Helena was born.

Remarkable as it is to see Helena (spelled Elena) recorded, that is not the end of it. Family 18 is also of interest to us. The surname Bueler should, I trust, be recognizable, even though the top of the letter l has been omitted or erased.

The focus of our attention is on the first-listed son, the one that begins with the letter D, followed by the Cyrillic equivalents of a, v, i, and d (with a soft sign yeri at the end, I believe). This David Buller was two years old when the register was taken, so that would place his date of birth in 1817 or 1818. To the best of our knowledge, this was precisely the time period during which our David, the father of Peter D, was born.

Given the convergence of evidence—the fact that David lived in Waldheim and thus was likely a resident of Volhynia before that, the fact that Helena Zielke and this David Buller are located in the same village in Volhynia, which would explain how our Helena and David met and married, and the fact that the date of birth for the David on the register is the same as David our ancestor—there really can be no doubt: this David is our David at two years old living in the Rovno district of Volhynia.

Because we (actually, Richard D. Thiessen and Glenn Penner) have found David, we now know the name of David’s father: his name was Benjamin. We also know the name of David’s mother: Helena, just like David’s later wife. There is more to explore here and across Volhynia in general. I think this is enough for today.


Source

Chaiderman, Sergei, trans. 1997. Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820. Posted by Richard D. Thiessen on the Mennonite Genealogy website. Available online here.

The Volhynian context 2

The previous post surveyed Volhynia as a geographical space, noting, among other things, that the region encompasses both a plateau in the south conducive for raising grains and a more marshy and wooded area in the north that is better suited for raising livestock. We also observed that Volhynia is in the northwest part of today’s Ukraine but has been surrounded by other countries, most notably, as we will read below, Poland and Russia.

With this brief geographical context in place, we are ready to explore Volhynia within a particular time frame, that of the latter part of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, when our ancestors were likely to have lived there.

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at its greatest extent. Lutsk (Łuck)
and Rovno (Równe) can be seen in the lower center.

We begin the historical account several hundred years earlier, during the sixteenth century, when Polish nobles and tradesmen moved eastward into Volhynia, much to the detriment of the native Volhynian peasantry. In time, Volhynia became a Polish crown voivodeship (roughly equivalent to a modern province or county) in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This absorption of Volhynia into the Polish kingdom “accelerated the [process of the] Polonization of the administration and the upper estates of Volhynia” (Hrytsak, Kubijovyč, Pasternak, and Stebelsky 1993).

So it was that Polish nobles came to control much of the land in the Volhynian region, possessing it in the form of large estates that were passed on from one generation to the next. The nobles retained ownership even when Poland ceased to control the Volhynian region and after the Polish kingdom became no more.

If you recall, an earlier post commented on a seismic shift in regional power toward the end of the eighteenth century: the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 (see here). We noted then that our Buller ancestors living near Schwetz were transferred from Polish to Prussian rule when Austria, Prussia, and Russia decided to begin carving up the Polish kingdom.

Volhynia was left untouched by that first partition, but as a result of the second and third partitions Volhynia become a part of the realm of Tsar Paul I, son of Catherine the Great. In 1799 the region became a gubernia (or province) in the Russian Empire. It was also at that time that Volhynia was organized into the ten districts represented on our working map below.

Why do we take the time to recount this history? When Mennonites began immigrating to the Volhynia gubernia shortly after the turn of the century (1801), they were entering a region that was largely populated by native Volhynians but mostly owned by Polish nobles and completely controlled by the Russian government. Our forebears no doubt had to navigate a highly complex social and political landscape, probably more than we ever will have to face.

Taking a moment to set the historical context also makes us better readers of the 1848 Waldheim community report. If you recall, the Gemeindebericht said that some Waldheim residents came “from the district Novograd Volhynsk [in Volhynia] from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij” (Woltner 1941, 159). Knowing what we now know, it is not surprising to see the name of a Polish noble as the landlord of the Mennonite farmers within the Russian Empire, although it is still remarkable to realize these humble farmers were dealing with one of the leading royal families in Poland, the House of Lubomirski (see further here).

Now that we have set the Volhynian context in space and time, we are ready to explore several waves of Mennonites who moved into that region. We may very well spend substantial time in Volhynia, as we expand our understanding of our family’s history.

Sources

Hrytsak,  Petro, Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Yaroslav Pasternak, and Ihor Stebelsky. 1993. Volhynia. Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Available online here.

Woltner, Margarete. 1941. Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer. Sammlung Georg Leibbrandt 4. Leipzig: Hirzel.

The Volhynian context 1

In order to understand the context in which our ancestors David and Helena likely lived, we need to acquaint ourselves with the space and time of their world. This post will explore first the Volhynian space, while a following one will identify key historical developments of that space during the time of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I suspect that most of us had never heard of a region called Volhynia until we first learned of it in a discussion of Helena Zielke in late 2014 (here). Nevertheless, Volhynia has been an identifiable region since at least the tenth century. Of course, the borders of the region have shifted from time to time, as first one power incorporated Volhynia into its realm and then another engulfed part or all of Volhynia into its empire, but the general outline can be identified, as in the first map below.

A second map sets Volhynia in its modern geographical context. The red pin is located approximately in the center of Volhynia (today in northwestern Ukraine). One sees Russia to the east, Belarus to the north, and Poland to the west. The yellow star above the label Poland is the location of Schwetz (i.e., the Przechovka church), while the star in the lower right marks the Molotschna colony. Volhynia lay between the two.

During the historical period that interests us, Volhynia was divided into twelve districts, each one named for its chief city. Thus, earlier we read about some Waldheim residents coming from the Lutsk area (see here), which is a reference to the district surrounding the town of that name. We also learned that some Waldheim residents came from Novgorod Volynsk (just right of center), and we will soon encounter other residents who settled in the Rovno district (center north).

Over the course of several posts that follow, we will locate and add Mennonite villages to the map above, as a way of pinpointing the Mennonite presence in the region at particular times and places.

The Kremianets Mountains in Volhynia.

But before we leave this post, let us take a moment to learn what kind of landscape Volyhynia offered our ancestors.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, “Volhynia is the meeting ground of two distinct landscapes: the glacial [in the north] and the plateau [in the south]” (Hrytsak, Kubijovyč, Pasternak, and Stebelsky). In the southern part, “The northward-flowing Ikva River and Horyn River have cut deeply into the plateau and turned it into an eroded upland with mesas and pinnacles. The Kremianets Mountains, rising to 407 m above sea level, are the most picturesque part of Volhynia.”

Farther north (in the Polisia area), the terrain descends in elevation and is characterized by lowlands, marshes, and mixed forests.

The Volhynian Polisia landscape.

Although Volhynia at that time was primarily agrarian (in fact, as of 1987, “52 percent of the population was rural, and most of it based its livelihood on agriculture”), the specific type of agriculture practiced depended on one’s location in the region. The plateau area of the south was most conducive to growing grains and other food sources, while the northern part of Volhynia was more appropriate for forestry and raising of livestock (today, dairy and hog farms).

This is the geographical context in which some Mennonites, perhaps members of our own family, lived during the early part of the nineteenth century, before they left Volhynia for Waldheim in Molotschna colony. Now that we have a better feel for the geography of Volhynia, we are ready to survey the historical time during which these people inhabited this space.

Source

Hrytsak,  Petro, Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Yaroslav Pasternak, and Ihor Stebelsky. 1993. Volhynia. Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Available online here.

Before Volhynia, there were Neumark and Schwetz

The last two posts—about farm life in the early 1900s and irrigation in Henderson—allowed us all a moment to let the heavy layer of information of two earlier posts—“Still at Waldheim” (here) and “Before Waldheim, there was Volhynia” (here)—settle somewhat before we stir up things by digging down into the next historical stratum. But first, a brief recap of where and why we are headed this way.

As we have rehearsed a number of times, our family came to Henderson township of York County from the Molotschna Mennonite colony in New Russia (modern-day Ukraine). Peter D and family lived in the village of Kleefeld most of that time, but his father and mother (David and Helena Zielke Buller) and siblings lived in another village 22 miles away: Waldheim. We know that to be true because contemporary records (school registers) list David as father and several of his children as students of the Waldheim school during the 1861–1862 and 1873–1874 years (see here and here).

What makes David’s residence at Waldheim significant is that, as late as 1848 (only thirteen year prior to the documented presence of David), Waldheim was populated exclusively by Mennonites who came from a particular region: Volhynia. In fact, the residents of Waldheim came from three specific locations in Volhynia (which was the topic of discussion in the mind-numbing post here).

We know all that from the Waldheim community report of 1848, which we have been exploring for several posts—and which we will continue to explore a little more below. Why go over this ground again? To make it clear that, if David was a resident of Waldheim in 1848 (which seems likely), he also had come from Volhynia, not directly from the Schwetz area (the Przechovka church), as the Buller Family Record implies and we have previously thought.

 But this does not mean that our search for Buller ancestors in the Schwetz area was a false lead. In fact, the 1848 Waldheim Gemeindebericht (community report) confirms our instincts on that front by reporting where the Volhynian Waldheim residents had originally lived:

Countryside in the former Newmark province of West Prussia, with
the village Błotnica, Poland, in the distance.

In general, their [now-]deceased ancestors migrated to the places mentioned in the years 1806–1818 from the Neumark province at Driesen and from the village Schwetz in West Prussia. 

That is, the generation before those who had moved from Volhynia to Waldheim (“their [now-]deceased ancestors”) had migrated to Volhynia mostly from two locations: the Neumark province at Driesen and the Schwetz (Przechovka church) area in West Prussia (hence the title of this post). To put this into full perspective, we may trace our reasoning back as follows:

• All 1848 Waldheim residents came to that village from Volhynia.
• Therefore, if thirty-one-year-old David lived in Waldheim in 1848, he also came from Volhynia.


• The ancestors of those who migrated from Volhynia to Waldheim originally came from the Neumark province at Driesen and the Schwetz area in West Prussia.
• Thus, if David came from Volhynia, his line of Bullers originally came from the Neumark province at Driesen or the Schwetz area in West Prussia.

We already know quite a bit about the Schwetz area and the Bullers listed in the Przechovka church book we have explored from time to time. But what about the Neumark province? Where is that, and what relevance does it have for Bullers or other Mennonite families?

All questions that we will answer in due course—after we first spend additional time learning about Volhynia. All we need to know for the moment is that our course is from the known to the unknown: from Waldheim (where we know David lived) back to Volhnyia (where we think David lived) and then from there back to Schwetz and the Neumark province (where David’s parents and grandparents may have lived). We will carefully excavate each layer of that historical deposit in hopes of understanding better the contexts in which our ancestors likely lived and perhaps even finding one or more of them along the way.

Serendipitous search

One of the benefits of Google is the way a search for one item can point the searcher to an unrelated item that proves to be of equal interest. For example, because I was unaware that grapes were often grown in the Henderson area, I searched for the terms grape, cultivation, and York County before writing the post. One of the results returned was the biographical sketch about Jacob Friesen. Another result deserves its own post, which is what follows.

By chance, the October 1950 Mennonite Life has one article on grape cultivation in the San Joaquin River Valley in California (think Dinuba, Reedley, Parlier, and Sanger), followed by an article on a certain Mennonite town in York County, Nebraska (Friesen 1950). More specifically, the article is about the way irrigation revolutionized the farm economy in the Henderson area.

Of course, one cannot write an article about Henderson irrigation in 1950 without mentioning John and Gus Thieszen, two leading pioneers in the development. Nor can I write this post without at least noting that Gus Thieszen’s company (whose drilling rig is pictured above; I may be mistaken, but the person next to the compressor appears to be Gus) was eventually purchased by one of Grandpa Chris’s sons, Carl, who later sold it to his son Steve (for another drilling-related post, see here).

As evidence of the increased yields possible on irrigated land, the article provides a photo of corn cribs and the explanation that those who “had more wells constructed on their farms … simultaneously replaced their single-ring cribs of corn with two-, three-, four-, and even five-ring cribs of corn” (Friesen 1950, 12).

But no need to take my word for it; you can read the article for yourself. Thanks to the good graces of Bethel College, all the back issues of Mennonite Life are freely available to anyone who cares to read them (see here). The October 1950 issue is available here (scroll down to page 10 in the magazine, which is page 12 in the PDF file).

Source

Friesen, J. J. 1950. Remaking a Community—Henderson, Nebraska. Mennonite Life 5.4:10–13. Available online here.

Farm life in the early 1900s

In celebration of the Henderson, Nebraska, centennial in 1974, the Henderson Centennial Committee commissioned the publication of a substantial volume titled Henderson Mennonites: From Holland to Henderson (Voth 1975). Thumbing through the work recently, I happened upon a few Buller family photos. The photos are not of the same line as Grandpa Chris’s family, but they are reasonably close relatives just the same.

As we all know well by now, our first known Buller ancestor was David, who had nine children, one of whom was named Peter D. Following on, Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller had eleven children. Of this couple’s seven sons, one was named Peter P, and another was named David S (for Siebert). Peter P, of course, was Grandpa Chris’s father. The subjects of our interest in this post are David S and at least two of his children: David E and Margaret. The relation between this Buller line and our own can be presented schematically as follows.

		David
		|
	—	Peter D	—
Peter P				David S
|				|
Chris				David E
				Margaret

In other words, David S was Grandpa Chris’s uncle, and David E and Maragret were his cousins. All that provides the background for several photos discovered in Henderson Mennonites. The first photo shows David E feeding the family hogs while his sister (probably Margaret) and a dog look on. Since David E was born in 1907, one might guess that this photograph was taken in 1913 or 1914. Notice that David appears to be barefoot, which I imagine was not at all unusual.

This photograph and the one immediately below from Voth 1975, 56.

David E also appears in our second photograph, but this time along with his father David S. According to Henderson Mennonites, the photograph shows their harvest of a “bumper crop of grapes.” People today may not equate central Nebraska with grape production,  but Nebraska farmers of the early 1900s often cultivated grapes. For example, an 1899 collection of biographical sketches writes of Henderson’s Jacob Friesen (GRANDMA 64984) as follows: “The orchard upon his home place contains over two hundred apple trees, two hundred cherry trees and other fruit trees in abundance, especially grapes, from which he manufactures the best of wine” (Ogle 1899, 435). The photo of David S and David E demonstrates that Jacob Friesen was not the only prolific grower of grapes in the Henderson area.

The third photo also shows David E, this time joined by his younger sister Margaret (according to the identification in Voth 1975, 65). Note especially the construction of the sled in the lower photo. It is almost certain that Grandpa Chris, who was born a year before David E, joined these and other of his cousins for wintertime fun on his own sled of similar construction. Thus the benefit of this post is not only that we learn more about a related line of Bullers but that we also see what life was like for our own direct ancestors who lived at the same time and same general place.

Sources

Ogle. 1899. Memorial and Biographical Record and Illustrated Compendium of Biography: Containing a Compendium of Local Biography, Including Biographical Sketches of Hundreds of Prominent Old Settlers and Representative Citizens of Butler, Polk, Seward, York and Fillmore Counties, Nebraska, with a Review of Their Life Work. Chicago: Ogle. Available online here.

Voth, Stanley E., ed. 1975. Henderson Mennonites: From Holland to Henderson. Henderson, NE: Henderson Centennial Committee.

Before Waldheim, there was Volhynia

As we saw in the last post, the sixty-eight families who lived in Waldheim in 1848 were reported to have come to this Molotschna village from the province of Volhynia. The Gemeindebericht mentions three locations in particular.

(1) from the village Ostrowa in the Lutzkischen district on the estates of the nobleman Michael Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the Rokonosch district not far from the town Wissotzk from the manor of the nobleman Watzlaf Vorainy; (2) from the village Wolla on the estates of the nobleman Ignat Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the manor of Count Olisarow near they town of Rawalowka in the Lutzkischen district, and (3) from the district Novograd Volhynsk from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij.

In a note to the report Margarete Woltner states, “The locations of the villages listed … could not be established. Apparently the names are garbled” (1941, 158 n. 4). The situation might not be as bleak as Woltner suggests, so we will take a step back to place the former Volhynian home of the people of Waldheim in broader context.

We begin by gaining a sense of Volhynia’s place within the larger Polish/Prussian and Russian world. In the map to the right, the yellow star where the red line starts is the area of Schwetz, Poland/West Prussia, where the Przechovka church was located; the red marker at the other end of the line is roughly the location of Ostrowa (or Ostrgog) in Volhynia. The distance between the two locations is approximately 340 miles.

The map below zooms out and gives us an even broader perspective. Both Schwetz and Ostrowa are still on the map, but now we have added a large area to the southeast, what was formerly called New Russia and today is known as the Ukraine. The second red line extends from Ostrowa in Volhynia to the center of the Molotschna colony (near) Waldheim. The distance is double that from Schwetz to Ostrowa: 680 miles. The point of presenting these maps first is to give a sense of how far the residents of Waldheim in Molotschna colony emigrated in comparison to the distance that their forebears traveled to go from Schwetz to Volhynia. We will come back to that original migration later. One other point to tuck away is that the road from Schwetz to Volhynia passes directly through the area of Warsaw. We may have occasion to revisit that fact in the future.

To be slightly more precise (although precision is impossible, since borders shifted first one way and then the other throughout history), Volhynia encompassed the area highlighted in yellow in the map below.

Now that we know generally where Volhynia was (between Poland and the Ukraine/New Russia) and how it was situated geographically in relation to Schwetz and to Molotschna, we are ready to return to the Volhynian locations from which the residents of Waldheim emigrated.

As already mentioned, Margarete Woltner believes that the village names are garbled. However, the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online’s article on Volhynia (Schrag 1959) identifies nearly all the villages mentioned in the Gemeindebericht. We will work through both the list and the article together, making reference to the more detailed map of Volhynia immediately below.

Map of Volhynia after Schroeder and Huebert 1996, 57.

1. The community record first mentions “Ostrowa in the Lutzkischen district on the estates of the nobleman Michael Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the Rokonosch district not far from the town Wissotzk from the manor of the nobleman Watzlaf Vorainy.” The term “Lutzkischen district” refers to the area around the non-Mennonite town of Lusk (aka Lucko, Lutsk, and Luzk) at the far left of the map. Although one might think that the mention of Ostrowa would be to the non-Mennonite town Ostrog (aka Ostroh, possibly Ostrowo), which is the black dot above the cluster of red dots southwest of the center of the map, that is actually not the case. As Schrag explains:

The best known of these migrations [from Neumark and Schwetz] was that of a group of 21 Mennonite families with the names of Beyer, Bose, Dirks, Voth, Nachtigall, Nickel, Pankratz, Richard, Sperling, Unruh, and Ziekle, who in 1811 entered into a contract with the nobleman Waclav Borejko, settling on his land and founding the vil­lage of Zofyovka located north of the town of Wysock on the Horyn [or Goryn] River. … The group left Zofyovka in 1828 and established “Ostrova” [or Ostrowa] which is identical with Jozefin, 20 miles northeast of Luck, Volhynia. They also settled in the neigh­boring village that they again named Zofyovka. Here they were on the land of Count Michael Bichkovski.

Schrag begins his explanation in a village to the north of this map, then tells of a move by certain families southwest to the area mentioned in the 1848 Gemeindebericht. The references to Ostrowa, Luck/Lutsk, and Count Michael Bitschkowskij confirm we are dealing with the same villages and areas. Thus, we can safely identify the first location from which the later residents of Waldheim came with the two red villages in the upper left of the map, northeast of the city of Lusk.

Two notes before we move on. (1) People of that time had no qualms about using the same village name for different locations in which they lived. For example the Mennonites in this group named their village Zofyovka in their first location (somewhat north and east of this map), and they gave their new village near Lusk the same name later on. We will see the same phenomenon repeated in what follows. (2) One of the families of this first group bore the last name Ziekle, which is probably an alternate spelling of the name we know as Zielke, as in Helena Zielke, David Buller’s first wife.

2. After Ostrowa comes “Wolla on the estates of the nobleman Ignat Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the manor of Count Olisarow near they town of Rawalowka in the Lutzkischen district.” According to Schrag, “The second group coming in 1806–18 settled near the town of Rafalovka on the Styr River some dis­tance north of Luck, on the land of Count Olisarov. Later this group moved to the colony of ‘Vola’ in Volhynia but neither the time of the move nor the location of the colony is known.”

The town Rafalovka (aka Rawalowka) is approximately 50 miles north of Lusk on the Styr River, so north of the edge of the map. As Schrag notes, colony Wolla/Vola is otherwise unknown and cannot be located. (Note as a matter of interest that this group of Mennonites, like the first, settled on the land of a different nobleman named Bitschkowskij, presumably a relative of the first. This probably means that Wolla/Vola was close to the other Bitschkowskij estate.)

3. The last Volhynian location is described more briefly: “from the district Novograd Volhynsk from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij.” The town Novograd-Volynskij appears on the map just right of center. Note that the Waldheim Mennonites are not located in that town but in the area (district). Schrag explains, “A third group coming to Volhynia, some of which may have come as late as 1823, settled in two villages 20 miles south­west of Novograd Volynski, named *Waldheim (Waltajem) and Zabara (Dossidorf).” The two red dots southwest of Novograd-Volynskij are the villages referenced here.

One would think that everything has been tied up neatly, with the three Volhynian locations now correlated between the Gemeindebericht and Schrag and identified as best as anyone can. But this is where the matter turns fuzzy, since Schrag continues to talk about other Mennonite villages that he will later connect with Waldheim in Molotschna. He writes, “There is evi­dence that in this period some Dutch-Prussian Mennonites located at the villages of Horodyszcze, Bereza, and Melanienwald, all three approximately 25 miles northwest of Novograd Volynski. All three villages appear on the map above, moving northwest from Novograd-Volynskij. Having mentioned all these villages plus others in Volhynia, Schrag turns his attention to the migration to Molotschna colony:

In 1836 … the Men­nonites living in the above villages of Jozefin-Zofyovka [group 1 above], Waldheim-Zabara [group 3 above], and Horodyszcze-Bereza [Schrag’s additional group that is not mentioned in the Gemeindebericht], 40 families in all, left Volhynia, and settled in the south Ukrainian Molotschna Mennonite settlement, where they founded the village of Waldheim, a name carried with them from Volhynia. 

What are we to make of this? Given the fact that the Gemieindebericht’s description of the first and third groups appears to be reliable (not at all garbled), its identification of the second, Wolla group, should be accepted as correct until it is proven wrong. Schrag does not indicate his basis for offering a divergent explanation, so his remains a possible explanation, nothing more.

Although we are unable to answer all the questions that come to mind, we do know a bit more about the people who emigrated from Volhynia to Waldheim. Almost certainly that body included some Bullers, perhaps even one named David. Beyond doubt that group did include some Ziekle/Zielke families, among them probably my great-great-great-great grandmother Helena.

Note

* Clearly, it is of great interest that one of the Volhynian villages was named Waldheim, just as the Molotschna village was named.

Sources

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available here.

Schroeder, William, and Helmut T. Huebert. 1996.. Mennonite Historical Atlas. 2nd ed. Winnipeg: Springfield.

Woltner, Margarete. 1941. Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer. Sammlung Georg Leibbrandt 4. Leipzig: Hirzel.

Still at Waldheim

Several posts back (here) we read the 1848 community record (Gemeindebericht) that Waldheim’s mayor, mayoral assistants, and school teacher wrote for the Guardians’ Committee of the Foreign Colonists in the Southern Regions of Russia. This post examines what is written in that record more closely and against the backdrop of David Buller’s residence in this village.

If you recall several posts from early 2015 (see here and here), the Waldheim school records from 1861–1862 leave little doubt but that David and family were residents of Waldheim by that time, as David’s sons Benjamin and David appear on the school register. The school records for 1873–1874 add another piece to the puzzle, as they list not only a younger son who is now in school (Jacob) but also indicate that David was the owner of Wirtschaft (farm) 48.

Over time Waldheim grew to become the largest village in Molotschna
colony. By the early 1900s Waldheim was home to significant industry,
including a factory for manufacturing farm implements.

Against this background, let us revisit some of the information recorded in and alongside the 1848 Waldheim Gemeindebericht. We begin by comparing two related sections:

This village was founded in 1836. That year eight landowners settled in it, twelve in the year 1838, and twenty landowners in 1840. …

The sixty-eight families of this village came from the province of Volhynia.

The first quotation states that Waldheim was founded in 1836 and that three groups of landowning families took up residence within it over the next five years. The second reports the state of affairs in 1848, when the community record was written. At that time sixty-eight families were associated with the new village. One might deduce from this that, between the years 1840 and 1848, twenty-eight additional families had moved to Waldheim.

Although that is a plausible first reading, it is not necessarily the correct one. Here it is important to recognize what the first quotation both says and does not say. For the years 1836, 1838, and 1840, the community report is concerned only with landowners*: there were forty farmsteads in Waldheim (as in nearly all early Molotschna villages), and by 1840 all forty farmsteads had been claimed. That is all that the first quotation has to stay. It does not claim that no other families came to Waldheim during those years; in fact, it seems quite likely that other (landless) families settled in the village at least in 1840; more on that further below.

One thing we know for certain is that the sixty-eight families who lived in Waldheim in 1848 came from the province of Volhynia. The writers do not say that some came from Volhynia and that others came from other villages in Molotschna, nor do they say that the original forty landowning settlers came from Volhynia and that the other residents came from Molotschna. No, the community report states that all of the families in Waldheim in 1848 came from Volhynia.

Why is this important? It implies that the families who emigrated from Volhynia to Waldheim did so a little less “neatly” than one might imagine. It seems a bit too convenient that, after eight families emigrated in 1836 and another twelve did so in 1838, an even twenty—exactly the right number to fill out Waldheim’s forty available farmsteads!—emigrated in 1840. The impression one might have is that, remarkably, all of the families who emigrated in 1836–1840 ended up owning land in their new home.

In fact, it seems quite likely that more than twenty families emigrated from Volhynia to Waldheim in 1840: some of them became landowners, while others probably worked as artisans or farmhands for the fortunate forty. The report does not mention the “additional” families for 1840 because its interest in the first section is only with the landowners. Further, it is reasonable to think that families continued to emigrate from Volhynia to Waldheim even after 1840 so that eight years later, in 1848, the village numbered sixty-eight families originally from Volhynia.†

In light of all this, several questions naturally arise: When did David Buller first take up residence in Waldheim? When did Helena Zielke Buller come to live in Waldheim? Did David and Helena come to Waldheim together or separately? From where did they come either individually or together? The answers to these questions still await further explanation and, especially, evidence.

Other aspects of the report deserve attention as well, such as the places in Volhynia from which the Waldheim residents emigrated and the areas (Neumark and Schwetz) that the emigrants’ parents and grandparents had earlier called home. A subsequent post or two will explore those trails; for now it is enough to know that, as of 1848 (when David Buller was thirty-one), all the residents of Waldheim had emigrated there from Volhynia. If David was a resident of Waldheim at that time, he, too, had lived in Volhynia in the recent past.

Notes

* The German term Wirte is here translated “landowners.” Other possible renderings are “hosts” or “landlords.” The emphasis clearly is on ownership, so “landowners” seems an accurate, idiomatic translation.

 † Margarete Woltner provides figures for 1855 and 1857 in a note (see the earlier post). In 1855 the village included 91 resident families, 51 of whom were landless; in 1857 Waldheim comprised 102 resident families, 59 of whom did not own land. Thus, in the seven years from 1848 to 1855, Waldheim increased by 23 families (33 percent, or 4.8 percent per year). In the two years from 1855 to 1857, the village increased by 11 families (12 percent, or 6.0 percent per year). This high rate of growth would seem to imply ongoing migration to Waldheim (whether from Volhynia, villages in Molotschna, or both), not merely natural population growth. Not to be forgotten is that some families in Waldheim went back to Volhynia in 1848. See the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online article on Volhynia here.

A memorable Super Bowl

It is hard to believe that today will see the playing of the fiftieth Super Bowl. I wonder how many of these games you all can remember. I confess that I was unaware of the first Super Bowl, between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but I was more engaged for the second, as the Green Bay Packers, fresh from beating the hated Cowboys in the Ice Bowl, went on to thump the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II.

I watched Joe Namath and the Jets beat the Baltimore Colts in number III (I even felt sorry for Johnny Unitas, whom I normally did not like, as he valiantly tried to rally the Colts), but by far the most memorable Super Bowl was the one that followed, played on 11 January 1970 between the Minnesota Vikings and the Kansas City Chiefs.

What makes this game so memorable is that it was the first time (maybe the only time?) that uncles and aunts and cousins gathered to watch a Super Bowl together. It remains for me, and I hope now for many of you, a day to remember.

We met at Daniel and Marie’s place, which I can still see in my mind’s eye. To get there from York, we took Highway 34 west, then, at the last intersection before Bradshaw, turned north on a gravel road. After driving north for five miles, we turned west and went about a quarter mile: their house and farmyard were on the left (south).

Pulling into the farmyard (i.e., facing south), the house was the first building on the left, and to the south of it was a summer kitchen. Some other building was to the south of it (I think), and at the south end of the farmyard was a cow tank with a big tree beside it (?). The barn was at the southwest corner of the farmyard, and north of it on the west side of the farmyard were one or two (machine?) sheds.

Ed and Esther and the kids lived relatively close. I believe they were still at the place that was exactly one mile west and on the north side of the road, although it is possible that they had already moved to the place a mile (?) north and east across the road from Daniel and Marie’s. If anyone has pictures of any of these places, I would dearly love to see them, since all the farmyards are now gone. Seriously, let’s try to preserve the visual record of these memorable places as much as possible.

Entering Daniel and Marie’s house on the west side, one came into (I think) a dining area, with the kitchen to the right (south) and the living room to the northeast. It seems that bedrooms were to the left (northwest), but that is a bit fuzzy. (Again, photographs would be helpful here!) I do remember that we (mostly the males) gathered in the living room to watch the Vikings pummel the Chiefs (or so many there that day thought) and thus cap their magical season by being crowned world champions.

The Vikings were coached by a legend, Bud Grant, and led by a phenomenon, quarterback Joe Kapp. Their defense, which included a front four dubbed the Purple People Eaters (Gary Larsen, Alan Page, Carl Eller, and Jim Marshall) led the NFL in fewest points allowed. Everyone sitting in Daniel and Marie’s living room knew the Vikings well: back in 1970 TV football fans had few choices about which games to watch; because Nebraska was in the Vikings “area,” we were fed a steady diet of Vikings games on CBS.

The Chiefs were largely unknown to many before the game, but that did not matter. The room was (mostly) filled with Vikings fans confident that their team would prevail. Walking in, I felt a little awkward, because almost no one there knew that I despised the Vikings (after all, they were in the same division as my beloved Packers). During the pregame routine, while I was sitting on the couch, the inevitable question about my loyalties came. Swallowing hard, I admitted that I was a Chiefs fan that day. At that point something wonderful happened: Ed announced that he was cheering for the Chiefs, too! Suddenly everything was okay: Ed and I were in this together.

The day only got better after that. Working Coach Hank Stram’s 1970s “offense of the future” (or so it was dubbed by Sports Illustrated after the game) to perfection, Len Dawson, Mike Garrett, and Otis Taylor led Kansas City to twenty-three points in the first three quarters. The real story, however, was the KC defense, which under the leadership of standouts Buck Buchanan, Curley Culp, Bobby Bell, and Willie Lanier limited the Vikings to sixty-seven rushing yards and forced five turnovers, giving up only a single touchdown in the third quarter.

At the time, the victory was sweet mostly because Ed and I were able to enjoy together the Chiefs beating all odds and pulling off what many considered an upset for the ages. In the years since then, the sweetness has shifted from the game and its outcome to warm memories of a Super Bowl afternoon well and enjoyably spent with aunts and uncles and cousins.  The times our family spent together truly are some of the sweetest memories we have. … So how about some photographs of those days and places gone by to share with everyone else?!

Before we leave Waldheim …

We will have occasion to return to Waldheim in the future, but, sadly, there are no more Rundschau letters from that Molotschna village. There are at least four more letters to read, but all were written 2,500 miles east of Waldheim, from the sparsely settled region of Siberia/Kazakhstan. Before we leave Waldheim, however, we should take a step back and learn more about the Molotschna village that members of our family called home for over half a century.

A useful source of information about Waldheim and other Russian villages inhabited by colonists is a collection of village reports commissioned by the Russian ministry responsible for governing foreign settlers within Russia. On 8 January 1848 the president of the Fürsorge-Komitee für die Kolonisten der südlichen Gebiete Russlands (Guardians’ Committee of the Foreign Colonists in the Southern Regions of Russia; see further Krahn 1959), Eugen von Hahn, sent out a circular requiring mayors and school teachers under his jurisdiction to compile Gemeindeberichte (community reports) for their villages, all 203 of them. So it was that Mayor Christian Schlabbach and Schoolmaster Henry Dirks wrote about life in Waldheim in 1848.

Waldheim (modern Vladivka) shown in relation to Kleefeld and Alexanderkrone
(where Peter D and family lived), which were approximately 22 miles to the southwest. 

Remarkably, many of the Gemeindeberichte were lost for decades. Some had been published in the Odessa newspaper Unterhaltungsblatt für deutsche Ansiedler im südlichen Rußland, but others lay unpublished and unremembered in the Odessa Fürsorge-Komitee ministry’s archives. Even after the lost reports were finally discovered, they often remained inaccessible to researchers until Margarete Woltner published them in her 1941 Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer (now available online here; for the German original of the Waldheim report, see here).

So, without further ado, we present the 1848 Gemeindebericht for Waldheim, Molotschna colony. (Be aware that the notes in the report are Woltner’s and are not part of the original report.) After reading the report in this post, we will examine it in greater detail in a subsequent post—but only after tomorrow’s special Super Bowl post.

***

Waldheim¹

This village was founded in 1836. That year eight landowners settled in it, twelve in the year 1838, and twenty landowners in 1840. The mayor’s office was held by Kornelius Wedel for ten years and [now] Christian Schlabbach in his second year.

The village is located on the creek Behemtschukrak² and is bordered on the east by the land of the crown village Chernigovka, on the south by the village Gnadenfeld, to the west by the newly founded village Hierschau, on the north by the crown land that the Mennonite Heinrich Janzen of the village Schönsee has leased. The village is 80 versts [53 miles] from Berdyansk and 350 versts [232 miles] from Simferopol. The extremely varied—black, gravelly, stony, and yellow clay—ground is quite suitable for cereal grains. Also, in spite of its elevated position, hay is abundant.

The sixty-eight families of this village³ came from the province of Volhynia, namely, from the following locations: (1) from the village Ostrowa in the Lutzkischen district⁴ on the estates of the nobleman Michael Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the Rokonosch district not far from the town Wissotzk from the manor of the nobleman Watzlaf Vorainy;⁵ (2) from the village Wolla on the estates of the nobleman Ignat Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the manor of Count Olisarow near they town of Rawalowka in the Lutzkischen district, and (3) from the district Novograd Volhynsk from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij.⁶ In general, their [now-]deceased ancestors migrated to the places mentioned in the years 1806–1818 from the Neumark province at Driesen and from the village Schwetz in West Prussia. Their advocate who brought about the high crown’s authorization for settlement and their guide on the trip from Volhynia to the Molotschna Mennoite colony in 1835 was Kornelius Wedel.

With the permission of the high crown through the mediation of the president of the Agricultural Association, Johann Kornies, and the Molotschna Mennoite Area Office, the settlers were assigned land that Kornies had previously leased and declared was entirely empty. The partly impoverished settlers have received no support from the crown; any necessary assistance came to them from the participation of the older, earlier-established farmers. The assets that they brought along may have amounted to 400 rubles silver.

Since the settlers had lived mostly in forests in Volhynia, Johann Kornies gave their village the name Waldheim [forest home].

Mayor Schlabbach
Assessors David Kühn and Johann Fast
Schoolmaster Henry Dirks

***

Notes [bracketed material below added by Buller Time]

1. Russian name: Polscha [today: Vladivka].
2. Begim-Tschokrak [or Behim-Chokrak].
3. 1855: forty farmsteads, ninety-one resident families (a total of 488 men, 473 women); see Mennonitische Blätter 4 (1857): 31 (the permanently absent are counted).
1857: forty-three farmsteads (205 men) in 2,840 dessiatines [7,668 acres] and fifty-nine landless families (296 men); see August Klaus, Nasi kolonii: Opyty i materialy poistorii statistike inostrannoj kolonizacii v Rossii, Unsere Kolonien: Versuche und Materialien zur Geschichte und Statistik der ausländischen Kolonisation in Rußland (Petersburg, 1869), supplement 2, p. 37.
4. The locations of the villages listed below could not be established. Apparently the names are garbled.
5. A larger resettlement of Mennonites from Kronsland [crown land?] was already planned in 1803; see Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossijskoj Imperii (Vollständige Gesetzessammlung des Russischen Reiches), vol. 27, no. 20843.
6. = Lubomirski.

Sources

Krahn, Cornelius. 1959. Fürsorge-Komitee (Guardians’ Committee). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Wahl, Dale. 1996. Introduction to the Village History Project. Available online here.

Woltner, Margarete. 1941. Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer. Sammlung Georg Leibbrandt 4. Leipzig: Hirzel.

No, it wasn’t the house from Green Acres

Yesterday’s post included a photograph of a house of two Buller families. The house was not, in spite of what one might think at first glance, the ramschackle home of Oliver and Lisa Douglas, which is pictured to the right. (Those too young or too forgetful to get this reference can click here for background. To watch the 1966 show opening, click here.)

The photograph was, in fact, of a home in Lushton, Nebraska, in the same general area as, but south and east of, the old schoolhouse. It was, if I recall correctly, between Gilbert Avenue on the west and Phillip Avenue on the east, and between 3rd Street on the north and 2nd Street on the south, toward the southeast corner of that block (see the Google Map of the location here).

The two Buller families who lived in this house were Carl’s and Daniel’s. Carl and family (sans me) lived in it first but moved to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm south of Lushton in late September 1957. Sometime after that Daniel and family moved into the house and lived there for three to five years, possibly more. If my memory is correct, all of Daniel and Marie’s kids except Michael lived in this house.

I have only one memory of the house, from when our family lived a block east of Daniel and Marie (we had moved there from the farm), so probably when I was four. The front door was on the right end of the porch, the black vertical strip in the photo above, I believe. Unless I am mistaken, the first area inside the house (in front and to the left) was a kitchen and dining area. I see in my mind’s eye a stove to the right, but that may be a false memory. I do not remember anything beyond that.

The picture below shows the back of the house and what I believe is a summer kitchen behind it.

Photographs such as this help to solidify the memories of those who lived through these times and enable those who were not alive at the time to understand something of what life was like for Bullers way back then. Similarly, photographs of our more distant ancestors and their surroundings help us to understand their lives more completely and appreciate their struggles more fully.

That is why this blog will continue to ask for photos both recent and far in the past to share with one another. Wouldn’t it be great, I can hear Kristi say (she is a Buller of a related line who frequents the blog), if someone somewhere found and shared a photograph of Peter D Buller?! Indeed it would, as would be discovery of photos of Peter D’s first farm and house a little more than a mile west of the south road of Henderson. All that so say, please do send any photographs you have. I will be happy to scan them and return them to you in the same shape—except that now the image will be preserved for as long as there are computers able to read digital files, which is probably as long as there is human life on this earth.

** If anyone has a photo of Albert Abraham Buller (Peter D > Abraham > Albert Abraham—so Grandpa Chris’s cousin), please contact me.