Bullers in Rovno 2

We have covered a significant amount of territory the past few months, so before we move forward again (which we will do below), perhaps a recap is in order.

• We began at Waldheim in Molotschna colony, the village in which David Buller (father of Peter D, grandfather of Peter P, great-grandfather of Grandpa Chris) lived and died. Several posts (here and here) explored the establishment of that village in 1836 and what we can learn about it from the 1848 community report.


• We also observed that all the early residents of Waldheim had moved there from Volhynia, so we spent time (here) learning helpful background on that area of northwest Russia (modern-day Ukraine), with Poland to the immediate west.


• We then took a further step back before Volhynia, to Neumark and Schwetz (here), because that is from where the earliest Mennonite residents of Volhynia came.

To summarize those posts as simply as possible, we moved back in time to trace our family’s likely history from Waldheim (where we know David lived) to Volhynia (where we suspect he lived before that) to Neumark and Schwetz (where we know Bullers lived, some of them in all probability David’s immediate ancestors).

After that first movement back in time, we returned to Volhynia, where we have been ever since.

• We began with several posts (here and here) providing the geographical and historical context of Volhynia in the early eighteenth century.


• Then followed a most important discovery: an 1819–1820 register of Mennonites from the Rovno district of Volhynia with the names of David Buller’s father and mother: Benjamin and Helena (see here).


• Examining the Rovno register more closely, we discovered that Benjamin, Helena, and David moved to the Rovno district in 1817 and that David was actually born in that area of Volhynia, not in Poland/West Prussia, as the Buller Family Record implies (see here and here).


• In hopes of identifying more precisely the place of David Buller’s birth, we searched for Wegtzin, the village purportedly named in the Rovno register (here and here). In the end, we learned that the village was actually named Wysock and that the nobleman Waclav Borejko owned land north of that town on which twenty-one Mennonite families founded a village named Zofyovka.


• With the knowledge that Benjamin, Helena, and David lived in Zofyovka beginning in 1817, we set out to learn we could about that setting. Remarkably, we found a record of the contract that the twenty-one Mennonite families (including two Bullers!) had made with nobleman Waclav Borejko in 1811 (see here, here, and here). 

To summarize these posts geographically, we entered the region of Volhynia, then focused on the Rovno district because it was there that David and his family lived, then narrowed our focus further to the town Wysock and the village Zofyovka to its north. In terms of chronology, we began with the 1819–1820 Rovno register, from which we deduced that Benjamin and Helena (David’s parents) moved to Zofyovka in 1817, then stepped back in time to the 1811 contract to learn about the first Mennonites who lived in that village (which included two Buller families).

So here we are back in the Rovno district of Volhynia, village of Zofyovka, ready to look at the 1819–1820 Rovno register of Mennonites once again. Our attention will focus for the rest of this post on our direct ancestors, Benjamin and Helena Buller and the other members of their family. We begin with the Rovno register entry for them.

According to Sergei Chaiderman, the translator of the “Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820,” the entry for family 18 reads as follows:

Benjamin Buller	31
his wife Helena		25
sons David	2
sons Dominik	4
nephew David	15

According to GoogleTranslate, the Russian phrase for “wife of him” (= his wife) is жена его, which appears to be what is written before Helena’s (actually Elena’s) name. As we noted earlier, Helena was six years younger than Benjamin. One wonders if this was David’s first marriage (or Helena’s as well).

Two Russian words for “sons” are сыновья and сыны, which again may be reflected in the register heading above David and Dominik. The Russian word for “nephew” is племянник, which might be the word at the beginning of the last line.

Orthographical matters aside, several details about the entry deserve mention.

1. The Benjamin Buller family did not include just children; a fifteen-year-old nephew named David was also a part of the household. We do not know why this nephew lived with his aunt and uncle. He may have lost one or both parents (the adult mortality rate then was higher than it is today), or he may have been sent to live with Benjamin and Helena to increase his opportunity of establishing himself in a trade or vocation (farming) or to help provide labor for Benjamin’s young family. We see the same phenomenon with family 3 in the Rovno register, Jacob and Maria Richert, whose sixteen-year-old nephew Jacob Nachtigal (presumably Maria’s blood nephew) was a part of that household.

2. As noted in the original post, the order of the listings in the Rovno register follows a pattern: first the male head of household, then his wife, followed by sons from oldest to youngest, then daughters from oldest to youngest, and, finally, other members of the household (e.g., nephew, mother-in-law, brother or sister of the primary husband and wife). In two cases the chronological pattern is broken: with family family 14 (Karl and Helena Wedel) and here, with Benjamin and Helena Buller, where two-year-old David is listed before his four-year-old brother Dominik.

Why the younger is listed before the older is not immediately evident, but one wonders if it might have something to do with ranking within the family. Considering the Wedel sons may shed some light on the matter:

sons Karl	5
sons Dominik	1
sons Heinrich	17

The disparity in ages between the oldest and second-oldest is rather large, and it makes one wonder if all three sons have the same biological parents. Couple that with the fact that the second-born bears the same name as his father (Karl), and one might plausibly suggest that Heinrich is the son of Helena and an earlier husband who died. He was a member of the household, to be sure, but as a stepson to the head of household he ranked below the full-blooded descendants of both parents.

This is nothing more than a hypothesis, but it might explain why four-year-old Dominik Buller is listed after two-year-old David. Perhaps Helena had a prior husband, now dead, who was the father of Dominik. It is also possible that Benjamin had a prior wife who bore him Dominik, so that David as the child of both Benjamin and Helena was listed first; however, the first scenario seems most likely, since rights of inheritance and family rankings were determined largely on the basis of the male parent. Whatever the explanation, it is interesting that David was not the oldest in his family but was listed first. That says a great deal in and of itself.

3. The name Dominik itself seems unusual; it does not sound like a Mennonite name. We are far more accustomed to Jacobs and Heinrichs and Davids and Peters and Johans and Karls. In fact, the GRANDMA database lists only a single Mennonite named Dominik for the entire nineteenth century: Dominick Weiland.

What is more than a little unusual here is that three people in this list of forty-four males are named Dominik, two from family 14 and one from family 18: Karl Wedel’s son and brother and Benjamin Buller’s (step?)son. One wonders: Was Dominik such a common name in other Mennonite families during this time? What, if anything, might this tell us about where these Mennonite families originated?

To sum up the new material in this post, we learn from Rovno register 1 that Benjamin and Helena Buller’s household included three children, one of whom was clearly the son of both parents, one of whom may (!) have been a stepson to Benjamin (or perhaps Helena), and a nephew. David was apparently ranked higher in the family than his (half-?)brother Dominik, and both ranked higher than their cousin David, who may have been part of the household due to the loss of one or both parents, in order to have the opportunity for his own advancement, or perhaps to provide much-needed labor for the household of Benjamin and Helena.

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 here.