First names

Sometimes asking simple questions and making simple observations uncover important facts; other times they are interesting but not apparently significant. The subject of this post may well fall into the latter category, but it is worth exploring just the same.

Several simple questions recently came to mind: Are there any patterns to the known first names of the three Buller lines descended from George Buller and Dina Thoms (that is, the names listed in the Przechowka church book)? If so, might those patterns help us to locate Bullers who appear in various historical records but not in the church book? The rest of this post explores those questions. (For the full-sized version of the Buller chart, see here.)

1. Counting Names

1.1. George 3XXXX: It seems reasonable to think that the son who had the same name as the father (George) was the oldest, so we begin with him. George 3XXXX had two sons: Peter has seven sons and grandsons listed in the Przechowka church book (PCB); Heinrich five. The total descendants of George 3XXXX, then, number fourteen in the PCB. The names of those descendants are:

Jacob: 6
Peter: 4
Heinrich: 3
David: 1

Remarkably, a mere three names account for thirteen of the fourteen Bullers in this line. Interestingly, nearly half (six) of those fourteen were named Jacob. Intriguingly, not one of those descendants was named George, the name of the founder of not only this line but this entire Buller family. We cannot say if any of this is significant, but it does seem noteworthy.

1.2. Hans 340: This line is the second largest of the three, at least in terms of names recorded in the PCB. Hans had three sons, all of whom have male descendants (sons and grandsons) recorded in the book. The names of all the descendants of this line are:

Heinrich: 3
David: 2
Peter: 2
George: 2
Hans: 1
Andreas: 1
Benjamin: 1

Unlike the line of George 3XXXX, this line shows significant diversity in first names. Specifically, the twelve descendants of this line bear seven different first names.

1.3. Peter 354: Only one son is recorded for Peter 354, so we have a limited number of descendants in this line:

Peter: 2
David: 2
Jacob: 1
George: 1
Andreas: 1

The same diversity we saw with the Hans 340 line is evident here: seven male descendants with five different names. Nothing else stands out as unusual, no doubt in part because of the small sample of names.

2. Looking for Patterns

Putting all three lines together produces the following cumulative totals:

Peter: 8
Jacob: 7
Heinrich: 6
David: 5
George: 3
Andreas: 2
Hans: 1
Benjamin: 1

These thirty-three male Bullers had only eight different names, and four of those names accounted for twenty-six (79 percent) of the descendants. Presumably this narrow distribution could be observed in other Mennonite families of the same time and place. Still, it is worth looking more closely to attempt to see if any patterns exist.

2.1. Six out of the seven Jacobs are in the George 3XXXX line, so it is safe to say that Jacob was a favored first name in that line. As we will see in a future post, a Jacob from this line led a sizable portion of the Alexanderwohl church from Molotschna to Kansas in 1874, thus demonstrating that Jacob continued to be a preferred first name for this line.

2.2. Peter is the most common name overall and common in all three lines. It offers us no particular pattern of usage.

2.3. Heinrich’s name is common in two of the lines but does not appear in the Peter 354 line. It is impossible to know if this is significant.

2.4. Remarkably, the name of the founder of the line (George) appears well down the list. Could this be a reflection of the fact that, by the time the PCB was compiled, the name of the line’s founder had been forgotten? To ask the question differently, was George’s name forgotten because few of his male descendants were given the name?

2.5. Most noteworthy of all, and especially for us, is the intriguing observation that two names are used only once, and both of them are in the Hans 340 line: Hans and Benjamin. This does not mean, of course, that there were no other Bullers named Hans or Benjamin within the sphere of this church. However, it does presumably hint that these first names were not common among Bullers of this time and place.

Recognizing this might also prompt us to focus our search for our own Benjamin Buller (the father of David) in the one line that attests that name. We do not know that our Benjamin came from that line (especially when one notes that Benjamin Buller 352 did not go to Volhynia), but that appears to be a potentially likely place to look.

Locating Andreas

You may recall that several weeks back we learned of someone named Andreas Andreas Buller (see here). In addition to Andreas, the family included his wife Anna, a daughter Maria, and two sons. Based on their ages in 1816, when an initial Volhynian census was taken, we can suggest rough years of birth for the family members:

name		age in 1816		approximate year of birth
Andreas Andreas Buller		43		1773
sons David		15		1801
Benjamin		12		1804
his wife Anna		49		1767
daugher Maria		18		1798

Only one other significant fact is known about the Andreas Buller family: they lived in the village of Antonovka in the Ostrog district of Volhynia. What makes this fact important was reported in a later post (see here): the Mennonites who populated Antonovka came from Neumark (aka Netzebruch, an area near Driesen), specifically from the villages of Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal.

Earlier we could go no further than this; now, however, the Buller chart may help us place Andreas a little more precisely. (For the full-sized chart, see here.)

Beginning at the level of the most likely, one cannot help but notice that, of the three lines of George Buller and Dina Thoms, only one ever lived in the villages of Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal: the descendants of Hans. More specifically, only two of the lines of Hans (columns A–B) are associated with those villages. Therefore, given the fact that Andreas Buller settled in a Volhyniah village whose residents were said to come from the area in which Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal were located, we can conclude with some confidence that Andreas most likely derived from the Hans 340 line of Przechowka Bullers.

But we may be able to say even more. As suggested in the table above, Andreas was probably born around 1773. This would appear to place him in the time frame of generation 4. Is it more than coincidence that one of the Neumark Bullers descended from Hans 340 is named Andreas? We do not know when Andreas and his brothers were born, but other male Bullers in generation 4 were born in the 1760s–1780s (see columns D–F), which makes it seem reasonable to imagine that Andreas 345 of the Hans 340 > Hans 341 line is the Andreas listed in the Ostrog census.

There is only one problem with that hypothesis: the name of this Buller was Andreas Andreas, not Andreas Hans, as it would have been if he had been Andreas 345. This leaves us to ponder a second hypothesis, that Andreas Andreas was the son of Andreas 345, that he was a generation 5 descendant of Hans 340. If the generation 4 descendants of the Hans 340 line were born in the early 1750s (as seems to be the case with columns B and C), then it would be entirely feasible for Andreas 345 to have been born in, say, 1753 and to have had a son born to him in 1773. In other words, it is possible that the Andreas Andreas of the Ostrog census was the son of Andreas 345 in the chart above.

In the end, we cannot say this is a fact, only that the identification of Andreas Andreas of the Ostrog census as a son of Andreas 345 is a reasonable hypothesis. Not to be missed in all this is how the Buller chart helps us sort, organize, and clarify new pieces of information about Bullers who appear in the historical record, which is reason enough to express thanks again to Glenn Penner for developing the chart in the first place.

Family line 3: Peter 354

Thus far we have covered the first two lines of the known sons of George Buller and Dina Thoms. The descendants of Hans 340, we learned, are for the most part not well attested in the Przechowka church book, presumably because they moved 120 miles away to the Neumark (aka Brandenburg or Driessen or Netzebruch) region, specifically the villages of Franztal and Brenkenhoffswalde. The descendants of George 3XXXX, however, are extensively covered in the church book, which reflects their ongoing settlement in the Schwetz area and their close association with the Przechowka church for more than a century.

This post takes up the family line of George and Dina’s third son: Peter 354 (column F in the chart below; see here for the full-sized chart).

We have already discussed the later members of this family line a number of times. For example, we identified George 375 in the census and registers of 1772, 1776, and 1789 (here and here). We also encountered this family when they moved to Volhynia (here). Several new details are also worth noting.

1. According to the Przechovka church book, Peter 354 (generation 2) fathered three daughters and the one son listed here. Thus, the generation 3 lineage given in the church book is probably fairly complete. Four children is smaller than most families but not unknown—and it is conceivable that Peter 354 died at an early age; we simply do not know enough to offer more than hypotheses.

2. Peter’s son George 375 lived in Jeziorka for a time and then moved to Volhynia, so his relation with the church was not as close as the George 3XXXX line examined in the previous post. This is reflected, it seems, in the sparse information available for George 375’s family. Only sons are listed (see 389–392 in the scan below), no daughters, and the church book generally has no record of baptism or marriage.

3. We know that two of George 365’s sons accompanied him to Volhynia in 1803–1804, but one son (Jacob 395) remained in the Schwetz area and emigrated to Alexanderwohl village in Molotschna along with the rest of the church in 1820. The fourth son (Andreas 390) is the least remembered: of his siblings, only he does not have a date of birth recorded, just a year. As far as we know, he did not emigrate to Volhynia or to Alexanderwohl, which might hint at an early death.

4. Generation 5 descendants of this family line are recorded in the church book until 1800, but after that they cease, possibly because a good portion of the family moved to Volhynia or passed on.

To bring this around to our family, it is intriguing that a number of the members of this line ended up in Volhynia, just as Benjamin and David did, but we cannot overlook the fact that they preceded our family by at least thirteen years. We cannot imagine Benjamin and Helena and David emigrating to Volhynia as part of this group. Of course, Benjamin and David still could be descended from the line of Peter 354; at this point we cannot say one way or another.

Still, having examined the three family lines derived from George Buller and Dina Thoms in some detail, we are able to form at least some reasonable conclusions:

• The George 3XXXX line is the least likely candidate for our ancestry, since that line seems to be relatively well recorded in the church book, and our family does not appear in it.


• The Peter 354 line is more likely than that, given the line’s loose association with the church (which would explain Benjamin’s absence), and the fact that some of the line emigrated to Volhynia. However, the timing of the emigration is quite different from Benjamin’s, which neutralizes that association as a compelling factor.


• The Hans 340 lines appears to be more likely than the other two lines, by virtue of the fact that this line moved away from the Przechowka church early on, thus explaining our absence from the church book. We have yet to establish any connection between this line and Volhynia, but if we are able to do so, that would tip the scale further in favor of this line.

Of course, we cannot be certain that the three lines of George and Dina were the only Bullers in town or even that all the generation 3 or 4 descendants of those three lines are recorded in the book. There may have been other Buller lines related to/descended from the George and Dina family, and we may be descended from those non-Przechowka Bullers. We do have a clearer picture of what we know, but it is to soon to tell what remains to be discovered. At least we know our tasks for the short-term: learn more about the Hans 340 line that lived in the Neumark area and search for other Bullers in the area who did not belong to the Przechowka church.

Searching Buller Time

Thanks to my brother Dan for suggesting that we add a search function to Buller Time, which you can see at the top right (above Blog Archive). This should simplify trying to find earlier postings that you want to read again in light of new information. A few things to keep in mind as you use the search function:

1. You can search for a single word, for multiple words, or even for an exact phrase enclosed within quotation marks. The search function will return what it considers the most significant results at the top, which is indicated by the results being sorted by relevance (first arrow below).

2. If you prefer, you can have the results sorted by date (maybe you want to read the posts in a certain order) by clicking the link under the second arrow.

3. Once you are finished and want to return to the normal listing of posts, click on “Show all posts” (third arrow).

4. The search function errs on the side of returning more rather than fewer results. So, for example, if you search for a precise phrase, the search function will return the post with that phrase in it as the most relevant result. Below that it will list posts with all the words of the phrase, even though they do not appear together as part of the phrase.

I hope this enhances your ability to navigate through and thus your enjoyment of Buller Time blog. Feel free to suggest other improvements as they come to mind.

Family line 2: George 3XXXX

George Buller and Dina Thoms had three sons (that we know of): Hans, George, and Peter. In the last post we explored the family line of one of those sons, Hans 340, and discovered that the Przechowka church book contains a fair amount of information about one part of that line (column C below) but almost nothing about the other parts (columns A and B). The explanation for this spotty coverage is obvious: some of Hans 340’s sons moved 120 miles away from the Schwetz area and the church, so the compilers of the church book did not have ready access to information about them.

This post moves one generation 2 son to the right to make observations about a second son of George and Dina: George 3XXXX. As before, you may want to consult the full-sized chart available here.

According to the church book, George 3XXXX had four daughters and two sons born between the years 1729 and 1743. Already we see a difference. No daughters are listed for Hans 340 (the subject of the last post), only three sons, and not one has a year of birth listed. Each of George 3XXXX’s six children has not only a year of birth but an exact date of birth provided. In addition, the church book records the marriage partner for each child. Clearly the information on this family line is much more complete than the previous one.

Moving down to generation 4 (see columns D and E above), we also discover additional details about the members of this line. Jacob 377, for example went to Alexanderwohl village in Molotschna colony in 1820, as did his deceased brother Peter’s widow and children and his cousin Jacob (387).

If we look further in the church book, we can identify more than twenty generation 5 descendants of this line, far more than the other two lines descended from George and Dina. The conclusion seems clear enough: the line of George 3XXX is the one that stayed in Schwetz and remained with the Przechowka church until the entire church moved to Alexanderwohl in 1820. Once in Molotschna, the church started a new register; I would not be surprised at all to find the George 3XXXX’s line continued there, since this was the central Buller line of the Przechowka-Alexanderwohl church.

Why should this matter to us? If it appears that the George 3XXXX line is fairly well accounted for in the Przechowka church book, and if our Benjamin or David Buller do not appear in that book, then it seems reasonable to conclude that we are not descended from George 3XXXX. We do not know that for certain, but it seems far more plausible than that our family was part of George 3XXXX’s line but was accidentally but thoroughly passed over in the church book.

One final note, George 3XXXX had the same first name as his father, which probably indicates that he was the first of the three known sons of George and Dina. Perhaps primogeniture (the favoring of the firstborn) played a role in the primacy of this family line within the church and even in the community?

Family line 1: Hans 340

Several days ago we introduced a chart showing the first four generations of male Bullers listed in the Przechowka church book. This post will explore the chart and the PCB further, in order to understand better both the information recorded and the apparent gaps in the record. To access the full-screen version of the chart, click here.

We begin by focusing on the generation 4 offspring of Hans 341, the column on the far left (column A). Although the chart records only four generations, the PCB also presents the names of generation 5 and at least one member of generation 6. Although those names are omitted from the chart due to limited space, we do not want to ignore those Bullers altogether.

What is interesting and noteworthy about column A, Hans 341’s line, is that only two members of his generation 5 are listed in the PCB. Hans’s three sons certainly fathered more than two grandchildren. However, the first two sons in that family line moved away from the Schwetz locale to the Neumark (aka Brandenburg or Driessen) area. As a result of their move, one would think, information about them is not included in the PCB. To state the matter directly, we know that there must have been far more descendants of Hans 341 than are listed, but the church book does not record them.

The same is true of the generation 4 descendants of George 342 in column B. The PCB does not list any daughters for George 342, nor does it list a single grandchild for this family line. It is possible, of course, that George 342 had no daughters (just two sons) and no grandchildren, but that is not what we have seen with other Buller families of that era. It seems far more likely that the descendants of George 342 simply were not known to the compilers of the church book. Why? They, too, had left Schwetz and moved to the Neumark area.

By way of contrast, Heinrich 343’s (column C) one son, Benjamin, has six children recorded in the PCB. In all likelihood, this is not a sign of Benjamin’s ability to father more children than his cousins but rather a simple result of the fact that he still lived near Schwetz when the PCB was compiled. In fact, Benjmain did not leave the Schwetz area until 1820, when he and the rest of the church moved to the village Alexanderwohl in Molotschna colony.

What is the point of making these observations about the three sons and associated family lines of Hans 340 (generation 2)? It is a matter of identifying possibilities and weighing probabilities. If we discover that the other Buller lines listed on the chart are apparently well-recorded in the PCB, and if Benjamin father of our David is not a member of those lines, then the possibility increases that our Benjamin derived from the Buller line that is not so completely recorded.

To be clear, at this point all we can say with certainty is that two of the three Buller lines descended from Hans 340 in generation 2 are not well-attested in the PCB. We assume there were other Buller descendants from these lines, but we do not yet know who they were. We certainly do not know if Benjamin father of our David was a member of one of these lines. The possibility is intriguing and enticing, but that counts for nothing in terms of evidence. There may be another explanation that we have not yet discovered or fully explored. The search for Benjamin’s father goes on.

Happy birthday, Grandpa!

On this day in 1906, 110 years ago, Cornelius (Chris) P Buller was born to Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller, the eighth child (seventh living) out of twelve total. Several posts have covered different aspects of his life, so, instead of repeating the information here, I invite you to follow the links below to be reminded of what made Grandpa Chris such an amazing person.

• Grandpa and Grandma’s wedding picture here


• Grandpa and Grandma’s fiftieth anniversary here


• Chris Buller, early irrigator here


• Grandpa and Goldie video here


• Grandpa’s wooden clock here and here


• Grandpa and his siblings here and here


• Grandpa and his boys here

From the entire family, happy birthday, Grandpa!

Buller chart

Several months back, Glenn Penner—who has supplied not only the Mennonite community but also Buller Time with a number of resources—sent me a hand-drawn chart showing the Buller lines descended from George (formerly Unknown) Buller and Dina Thoms, down to the fourth generation. It only took a few times of referring to the chart to recognize its value in helping me keep the various Buller lines straight, which led me to think that readers of this blog would no doubt find it valuable as well.

So, with Glenn’s blessing, I re-created the chart in Adobe Illustrator and have now posted it online in a large-scale version that you can view in a separate browser window or, if you prefer, download and print. Any post referencing the chart will offer a blog-size version of it, but the larger version will enable you to read the information easily.

The online version can always be found here. From that page you can (1) view the entire chart, (2) click on the chart in order to zoom in on a portion of it, or (3) download the chart to your computer, to do with it what you will (e.g., print it or save it for offline viewing).

To download the chart, click on the arrow-pointing-down-at-a-line icon that the red line is pointing to in the lower right of the screen shot below. I recommend downloading the original-size version, for the sharpest resolution.

A few words of explanation will help us navigate and use the chart most effectively.

1. The four shaded and numbered levels are the four generations represented: with George and Dina being generation 1, their three sons generation 2, six grandsons generation 3, and fifteen great-grandsons generation 4.

2. The shaded area for generation 4 lists all the sons of the generation 3 father. For example, on the far left, Hans was the father of Andreas, David, and Heinrich, while Hans’s brother George (just to the right) was the father of George and Peter, and so on. The point to remember is that generation 4 is laid out differently than the other three generations, and all the males listed under a given father were brothers.

3. Because generation 4 consists of six columns (six sets of brothers), we might also assign the labels column A, column B, column C, column D, column E, and column F to the family lines. Thus, Peter 359 and his three sons can be referred to as column D.

4. As you probably suspect, the number given under each person’s name is the Przechowka church book entry. We will typically use the first name and number (e.g., George 375) as a simple way of identifying the exact Buller in view.

5. Additional information of interest is listed below each name, but not everything known is listed for each person, and information about a person’s or a line’s movement is given priority. Thus one can see at a glance that columns A and B were generally associated with the villages of Driesen/Neumark, while the families of column F mostly went to Volhynia. Columns C, D, E, and one family in F are linked more closely with Alexanderwohl, in Molotschna colony.

6. The chart summarizes the information found in the Przechowka church book. There were Bullers in the Schwetz area who are not listed in the PCB (Benjamin father of David being the most notable example for us); they are obviously not included on the chart (yet).

7. To follow up on and reiterate the last point, we cannot say with certainty that Peter 354 had only one son or that George 3XXXX had only two. The chart presents the family relations that we know, but it does not assume that there were no others. To focus on our own situation, we cannot be certain that Benjamin father of David was a direct descendant of one of the six Bullers in generation 3. There may have been another member (or more) in that generation who is not listed in the church book but from whom Benjamin was descended. The wisest course is for us to admit that, for now, we simply do not know.

I think we are now ready to put the chart to use, as future posts attempt to sort out where the Bullers we encounter fit into the greater scheme of our family history.

Memories of Antonovka

We Bullers are not the only Mennonite family to maintain a blog or website; many families have their own online sites where their own histories and stories are recorded not only for themselves but for the entire world to see. The last post, on the possible pre-Volhynia location of Andreas, drew information from a blog and website maintained by Rod Ratzlaff (see here and here). This post relies heavily on a family memory recorded on the Smith-Kohen family website (here), which first came to my attention thanks to the Rod Ratzlaff site.

The memory was passed on by one Nelson Wedel, who was born in 1900 and died in 1972. In 1856 Nelson’s father Tobias was born in the village that has interested us most recently: Antonovka, in the Ostrog district of Volhynia. Tobias’s father Peter was likewise born in Antonovka (1830), and Peter’s father Benjamin is reported to have emigrated to the Ostrog area in 1804. Needless to say, this Wedel family had a long history in the area and the village in which Andreas Buller settled sometime in the early 1800s.

Several years before his death, Nelson Wedel wrote down what he had heard about life in Antonovka from his father, who spent the first eighteen years of his life in that village (i.e., 1856–1874, when the family emigrated to the United States). Given the later time frame, life in Antonovka was not exactly the same as when Andreas lived there, but it likely did not differ all that much in its broad contours. Life in Molotschna for David Buller and family (including Peter D) was probably similar as well, so Nelson Wedel’s reminiscences can transport us back to that time and that place so we understand our ancestors’ lives a little more concretely, a little more clearly. Without further adieu, then, we present memories of Antonovka.

They lived in villages on parcels of ground that were about 15 acres. However, some parcels were as small as 3 acres. Each parcel was subdivided for various purposes. There was a pasture, hay meadow, patches of rye and barley and a garden. Potatoes that they raised were usually stored under their beds to prevent their freezing.

Main street entering the village of Antonovka (Antonivka) today.

 I better tell how they constructed their buildings. The house and barn was entirely under one roof. The living quarters were four square. Father never said how many rooms there were. They had a big stove built of brick or rock in the center for heating. There was an opening in the outside wall of the house into which they could throw logs. These green logs were up to six feet in length and would burn
for days at a time. In the kitchen they had a place where there was a steel plate with smaller plates on which they did their cooking. Around this stove there was a bench where people could sit and warm their backs or even lie down. Beds were made of boards and were formed something like our wooden beds are today. Instead of soft mattresses and springs, they drilled holes in the sides and ends and strung ropes lengthwise and crosswise. On this they laid a bag made of heavy ticking filled with straw or hay. (This is where we get the low German word - straw sack.) Built into this house and still under one roof, was the entrance room. This was not just a hallway, but was large enough to provide living quarters for a small family, or sometimes it was a bedroom for the girls and maids.

Aerial view of Antonovka. The photograph above
was taken from the location of the red X.

The barn was next and also under the same roof. My grandfather, Peter Wedel, had as many as 16 cows. The milking was a ladies job. The cows were tied in the barn in fall and stayed until the green grass was ready for them in the spring. All the cows had horns. There was no such thing as dehorning a cow. When they started to jump and run and started butting each other, when turned out in the spring, the shout would go forth, “Children run, the cows will hurt themselves.”

Milking was not the only job for the ladies. They had to do the housework, cook the meals, and bake the bread. They did not have ovens like we have today. They had pans that were about 24 inches square and they baked four loaves in them. The oven was laid up with mud. It was heated to a certain degree of heat, then the live coals were raked out and the pans with the loaves were set on the hot ashes. The door was closed until the bread was done. The aroma of the baking bread penetrated the whole village.

Milk, potatoes and rye bread were their main foods. For Christmas, if they could afford it, they got a slice of white bread. Adults would eat at the table, but the children would sit around a bowl of soup or dumplings. All ate out of the same bowl and each had a wooden spoon. If anyone got a bigger dumpling, the same received a thump on the head with the wooden spoon from one of the other kids.

The farming was done in a cooperative way. They had one plow, with which they plowed all the ground in the village. This plow was a heavy beamed affair with two wheels under the front end of the beam and handles in the back. When plowing, they hitched four horses tandem. Therefore, it took two men to drive the horses and one to hold the plow so it would run straight and not fall over. I don't remember father telling how they worked the ground after it was plowed, but I think they had a harrow.

Seed were broadcast by hand. Potatoes and other garden plants and seeds were planted by hand. When the potatoes were about ready to be dug, guards would watch all night or the Musicks, a lower class of people, would steal them.

On the top of the barn was the hay loft. There was a room where the rye and barley, which was cut with hand sickles and hand tied into bundles, was stacked. These bundles were thrashed in the winter. They had a threshing machine which threshed out the grain but did not separate it from the straw, so they had to winnow it. Built into this storeroom was the wagon shed. All this was under one roof.

Wagons were mostly flatbed, four wheel wagons. When loose rye was to be hauled, they had ladders which were fastened to the wagons. This made them somewhat like our hay racks. These wagons were the only convenience they needed. They did not ride to church as we do here. The church was located in the middle of the village, so everyone walked. Not everyone had a wagon and horses or even one horse. When they had to go to town for supplies, they went with these neighbors who had horses and wagon.

Hay was cut with the scythe. This was also done cooperatively. Father said as many as ten to fifteen men would come together, each with a scythe on his shoulder. When they started to cut the hay, the head man would give a monotone sound and each man would swing his scythe at the same time. The hay was raked by hand with a wooden rake and hauled into the hay loft.

In the worship service they had only preaching. The sermons were mostly read from books. Their song books had no notes and so the melodies had to be memorized.

Their main occupation and income was weaving linen, which was sold and also used to make clothing. Since they did not own the land they lived on, the owner of the land came once a year to collect so much linen for the rent.

Thanks again to the Smith-Kohen family website for preserving this memory and to Rod Ratzlaff for pointing his readers to it.

Before Antonovka there was …

The 1819 Ostrog census that we referenced in the last post may (!) contain an important clue about the latest Buller family that we discovered. But before we get to that, let’s review a little, so that we become more comfortable with all these places and times that not long ago were completely unknown to us.

Our simple-minded way of working back in time has been to remember that before Lushton there was the Molotschna colony, specifically the villages of Kleefeld and, most recently, Waldheim—home of our ancestor David B Buller. Before Molotschna and Waldheim there was Volhynia, a region in the northwest of the Russian Empire, now part of the Ukraine as well.

The Volhynian gubernia (province) contained twelve districts, each one named for its chief city. We first examined a village in the Rovno district, Zofyovka, the home of Benjamin and Helena and David Buller roughly twenty years before they moved to Waldheim in Molotschna colony.

After that, in the post published several days ago, we moved to a new district and a new Mennonite village, specifically the village of Antonovka in the Ostrog district.

Before we look more closely at that village, we need to recall what came before Volhynia, namely, Neumark and Schwetz. That is, the Mennonites (and Bullers) who settled in Volhynia in the early 1800s and then moved to Molotschna in the late 1830s had lived prior to that in one of two areas: the Neumark province in the area of Driesen and the village Schwetz in West Prussia (for additional background, see here).

The reason to bring this up again is because it may have relevance for identifying where the Buller family listed in the 1819 Ostrog census (Andreas and Anna and their children: Maria, David, and Benjamin) lived before Volhynia.

According to Abe J. Unruh (see also Ratzlaff below), the Mennonites who populated Antonovka came from Neumark (aka Netzebruch, the area of Driesen, or the villages of Brenkenhoffswalde and Franzthal; they all refer to the same area), while those who populated Karolswalde (the other Ostrog village mentioned in the prior post) trekked there from the Schweta area, that is, from the Przechovka church whose church book we have spent so much time exploring.

Antonovka (modern Antonivka), with the Viliya (Vilia or Vilna) River to the north.

At the risk of confusing matters further, we should recall that the Neumark Mennonites (and Bullers) were related to the Schwetz Mennonites (Bullers) one generation back. In fact, the Neumark families were associated with the Przechovka church before they moved west in search of more favorable leasing conditions. For example, earlier we explored how several grandsons of the original Buller couple (George Buller and Dina Thoms) left Jeziorka and moved to the Neumark area (see here). Some of these Mennonites and Bullers have walked back onstage as they reappear now in various villages of Volhynia.

Looking north toward the village of Antonovka (modern Antonivka).

None of this is new or surprising information. It is, however, a good reminder that our search for our ancestors cannot be limited to a single locale. We know that Grandpa Chris’s great-great-grandfather Benjamin moved to Volhynia in 1817, but we do not know where he lived before that. It is possible that he came, as did many, directly from the Schwetz area. It is also possible, perhaps even likely, given the lack of evidence indicating that Benjamin was in the Przechovka church, that, like Andreas Buller of Antonovka, Benjamin lived in the Neumark area before he emigrated east to Volhynia.

It would be nice to know exactly how we are related to Andreas, who walked the fields and roads of Antonovka that we see above. Maybe someday we will discover how all the pieces fit together; for now it is enough to enjoy the process of sorting through those pieces and learning a good deal along the way.


Sources

Ratzlaff, Rod. n.d. Antonovka. Online here.

Unruh, Abe J. 1973. The Helpless Poles. Sioux Falls, SD: Pine Hill Press.

Another Volhynian Buller

One of the enjoyable aspects of Buller Time is the way the path sometimes twists and turns as it leads us in directions not expected before circling back around to touch on a person or an event previously encountered. We saw this first-hand in the previous post, as George Buller 375 from Jeziorka in West Prussia, whom we had discussed along with his sons several months ago, reappeared on government forms requesting permission to move to Volhynia.

So, instead of returning to the Rovno register series of posts that we left off here, we will continue to wander just a bit longer, since another piece of evidence is calling for our attention. (Rest assured, we will return to Rovno in due course.)

We pick up where we left off with the last post, with the George Buller 375 family, which included three of his four known sons: Peter, who was married and had his own family; and the unmarried Jacob and David. We left unanswered the question where in Volhynia these Bullers had settled in 1803 or 1804.

Disappointing as it is that we do not where those families settled, we can now locate another Buller within Volhynia. To set the stage, we return to our Volhynia map from before.

Roughly in the middle of the map is the city of Rovno. Approximately 90 miles straight north of there we see the village of Zofyovka, where Benjamin and Helena Buller, parents of David Buller, settled in 1817. We do not know where George 375 and his group settled, but another census, this one from 1819, allows to locate several more villages—and several more Bullers—on the map.

Southeast of Rovno is Ostrog, the capital of the district below Rovno. If you look closely at the mpa above, you will see two villages below Ostrog: Karolswalde on the east and Antonovka on the west. The villages are much easier to spot in the section of an early twentieth-century map below.

Both villages were “colony” villages, which as we learned earlier meant that they were inhabited by noncitizen people. In fact, Karolswalde and Antonovka were not only populated by Mennonites; they were two of the earliest Mennonite villages in Volhynia (Schrag 1959). This becomes important for our purposes when we look at the 1819 Ostrog census itself, posted here.

The census records the names and ages of eighteen Mennonite families living in the area; as noted, the census was taken in 1819, but it also includes information from an 1816 census. Comparing the two lists reveals which families had moved into the area between 1816 and 1819.

One of the earlier settlers was the Andreas Andreas Buller family. For easy reference, we reproduce the information for this family below.

name		age in 1816		age in 1819
Andreas Andreas Buller		43		46
sons David		15		18
Benjamin		12		15
his wife Anna		49		52
daugher Maria		18		21

The census indicates further that Andreas and family were registered in Antonovka, the underlined village on the west in the map above. Presumably registration in a village indicated residence there, so we can conclude until the evidence indicates otherwise that Andreas Buller and family settled in the village of Antonovka sometime before 1816. If I understand the history of Mennonite migration to Volhynia correctly, the Andreas Buller family moved into the area sometime after 1803 but before 1816.

Although we cannot know when Andreas moved to Antonovka, we may catch a hint as to where he came from simply by virtue of the fact that he settled in that village. That is the subject of another post, of course, so until then.…

* A confession: I first thought that this Andreas might be the fourth son of George 375, the one who is not listed in the requests to leave Prussia surveyed in the last post. Unfortunately, this Andreas’s year of birth was three years too early to make that correlation, 1873 instead of the 1876 on record for the son of George 375.

Source

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

The first Bullers in Volhynia … continued

The previous post introduced several archival lists uncovered by Glenn Penner that record the names and ages of over one hundred Mennonites who asked for permission from the Prussian government to emigrate from Jeziorka to Volhynia in 1803 and 1804 (see further here). Included on those lists were two Buller familes and two women whose maiden name was Buller (Anna Buller, wife of Behrendt Ratzlaff; and Anna Buller, wife of Andreas Koehn).

The two Buller families, who deserve closer examination, included the following individuals:

6		Peter Buller		31
		Anna Ratzlaff		30
		Ewa				6
		Anna				5
		Peter				4
		Maria				1
7		George Buller		49
		Maria Koehn		49
		Jacob				18
		David				15
		Maria				12
		Anna				10

These families requested permission to emigrate from Prussia on 15 September 1803, so we can calculate everyone’s year of birth (roughly) based on his or her age at that time. Peter, for example, would have been born thirty-one years before 1803, so 1772 or 1773. His wife Anna Ratzlaff, who was two years younger, must have been born in 1774 or 1775. George Buller and Maria Koehn, at age forty-nine, were born in 1754 or thereabouts.

As before, we look to the Przechovka church book to see if it identifies these Bullers more precisely. Because the Jeziorka Mennonites were typically associated with the Przechovka church, and because both families moved from Jeziorka (see here, here, and here) to Volhynia, we would expect them to be listed in the church book. In fact, they are.

PCB number 389 is Peter Buller, who was born on 23 February 1773. The church book also records that he married number 95, who is identified in the PCB as Ancke Ratzlaffen. Interestingly, she was born several weeks before Peter (in spite of having her age given as younger than Peter in the list), on 1 February 1773. All this is evident in the extract from the PCB below—as well as names of three of Peter’s brothers: Andreas (1776), David (1780), and Jacob (1783). We know that they are brothers because all have PCB 375 listed as their father.

So who is PCB 375? George Buller, husband of Trincke Köhnen (PCB 597). At first blush, one might conclude that the father of this Peter Buller was the head of the other Buller family who emigrated to Volhynia, George. However, several complications should be noted.

(1) According to the church book, George was born in 1847, not the 1854 that we expect. (2) The request to emigrate gives George’s wife’s name as Maria but the church book as Trincke (PCB 597); I do not know how to explain that, apart from Trincke perhaps being a given name and Maria a preferred (middle?) name. (3) Although the emigration application and the PCB agree that the couple had four children named David, Jacob, Maria, and Anna (Ancke), the years of birth differ in three out of four cases:

name		emigration year of birth		PCB year of birth
Jacob		1785		1783
David		1788		1785
Maria		1791		1788
Anna		1793/4		1794

There is no obvious reason why five out of the six years for this family are incorrect: perhaps it is a problem with the application, perhaps with the transcription. In any event, it seems that we have the right George Buller, since George 375 and his wife and children all match the governmental record rather closely (further, the GRANDMA database knows of no other Köhn who married a George Buller).

Assuming that we have identified the right Bullers, we can make some further observations. First, it is not surprising that father George and son Peter emigrated at the same time. We have suspected that this sort of “family migration” took place before, and here we see it in action.

Second, we cannot overlook the fact that this is not the first time we have encountered George 375. In fact, we discussed George in a post on Jeziorka (here) and another on the Prussian censusus of 1772, 1776, and 1789 (here). George Buller 375 appeared in all three of them. It is amazing that fourteen years later George pops up in governmental records again. Because he does, we now are able to answer the questions posed earlier:

• What happened to George after this time?


• What happened to his family?

The answer: in late 1803 or early 1804, George and his family packed up their household and moved some 300 miles east to a new region governed by a new authority. As far as we know thus far, they were the first Bullers to move to Volhynia. That being said, we should not be surprised if some other Buller who emigrated slightly earlier someday comes into view.

Third, a final note about something that we do not know (yet?): where in Volhynia George and Peter and their families settled. The request that they filed was to leave Prussia, not a request to enter Russia. If there was a request to enter Russia, we would likely know where they settled when they arrived. As it is, we can only form an educated guess, which we will attempt to do at some point down the line (possibly even in the next post).

Who were the first Bullers in Volhynia?

This post takes a momentary step back from the Rovno registers to expand our vision from the details of those registers (to which we will return) to the broader Buller experience in Volhnia. The question we pose is simple: Who were the first Bullers in Volhynia?

We know that Benjamin and Helena Buller took up residence in the village of Zofyovka in the Rovno district of Volhynia in 1817; we can also deduce that David Buller (future father of Peter D, grandfather of Peter P, and great-grandfather of Grandpa Chris) was born in that same village just a matter of months after Benjamin and Helena settled there. The map below shows where in Rovno their village was located: roughly 70 miles almost straight north of Rovno.

Of course, Benjamin and family were not the first Bullers in Zofyovka. The same Rovno register that lists them as family 18 records Andreas and Katherina Buller as 1811 residents of the village (see further here, especially for the possibility that Andreas was Katherina’s second husband), thus predating Benjamin by six years.

But neither were Andreas and Katherina the first Bullers in Zofyovka, let alone Volhynia. According to an 1811 contract between a noble named Waclav Borejko and twenty-one Mennonite families who first settled in that village, Heinrich Buller and David Buller apparently arrived before Andreas (see further here).

You know where this is headed, right? Thanks to a collection of three lists posted by Glenn Penner (see here), we can now say with certainty that, although Heinrich and David were the first Bullers in the village of Zofyovka, they were not the first Bullers in Volhynia.

I strongly encourage you to read the one-page introduction to the lists of names at the link, since it places these families in a clear context. To summarize, Glenn Penner provides translations of several lists of Mennonites who emigrated from Jeziorka (the village not far from the Przechovka church that we examined in some detail) to “Russland” (Russia). The significant part of the discovery is that these Mennonite families did not move to the Molotschna or Chortiza colonies, as was earlier thought, but to Volhynia.

The specific documents contain lists of Mennonites asking for permission to emigrate. The lists are dated precisely to days in 1803 and 1804 and record the names and ages of three different groups of families:

• Group 1, dated 1 August 1803, records seventeen persons from four families: Peter Richert and Eva Retzlaff; Peter Schmidt and Anna Koehn; Jacob Koehn and Eva Richert; and Peter Janz and Eva Richert.


• Group 2, dated 15 September 1803, records forty people from eight families: Peter Ratzlaff and Anna Schmidt; Andreas Koehn and Anna Ratzlaff; Jacob and Maria Schmidt; Andreas Schmidt; Samuel Schmidt and his fiancée Maria Koehn; Peter Buller and Anna Ratzlaff; George Buller and Maria Koehn; and Jacob Foth and Maria Nachtigal.


• Group 3, dated 18 February 1804, records fifty people from seven families: Heinrich Ratzlaff; Heinrich Schmidt and Eva Nachtigal; Jacob Becker and Anna Nachtigal; Peter Becker and Sara Nachtigal; Tobias and Catharina Janz; Peter Ratzlaff and Anna Schmidt; and Cornelius Janz.

Obviously, the families that interest us most are part of group 2: the families headed by Peter Buller and George Buller. As far as we know thus far (and this may well change as we learn more), these two families were the first Bullers in Volhynia.

This seems a good place to stop for now. The next post can look at Peter and George in greater detail before we move back to the Rovno registers. Our goal with this is to learn all that we can about Bullers in Volhynia, in hopes that we stumble upon new information about and insights into our family history.

Tying up loose ends

The previous post wondered aloud if Maria Schmidt of family 15 in the Rovno register 1 was closely related to the Peter Schmidt of family 16, the hypothesis being that closely related families may have been likely to make the trek from Prussia to Volhynia together.

Further research reveals that, although Maria and Peter were related, it was not remotely close. They shared only a common great-great-grandfather; stated differently, their relation was four generations back. Thus, it was presumably a coincidence that Maria and Peter emigrated to Zofyovka.

The same post also noted the presence of Efcke (Eva) Buller of family 16 in the same travel group (if that was the case) as Benjamin Buller and family. To recap briefly, families 15–18 are all reported to have moved to Zofyovka in 1817, so our working hypothesis is that they all traveled together.

Of course, since we do not (yet) know who Benjamin Buller’s father was, we cannot say how closely (or distantly) Efcke and Benjamin were related. The best we can do is to place Efcke in her historical and genealogical context in the Schwetz area.

Efcke was born, as one can see above, on 14 October 1784. Thus she would have been thirty-five if the register was compiled in 1819, not the thirty-three that the register lists. The Przechovka church book also records her place of birth (Klein Konopat), her year of baptism (1798—fourteen was an unusually young age for Mennonite baptism), and her date and place of marriage (6 November 1808 in [Deutsch] Konopat) to number 1233, whom we know as Peter Schmidt.

Looking more closely at the church-book entry, we see that her father was number 352, who turns out to be a Benjamin Buller who was married to a Maricke Cornelsen. Together they had seven children; Efcke was their sixth: Maricke, Heinrich, Ancke, David, Trincke, Efcke, Elizabeth.

Of course, the entire family descended from George (formerly Unknown) Buller and Dina Thoms. In this case the line was:

		George Buller || Dina Thoms
		|
		Hans Buller || —— Sarcke
		|
		Heinrich Buller || Ancke Beckers
		|
		Benjamin Buller || Maricke Cornelsen
		|
		Efcke Buller Schmidt

There is not much else we can say. We know that Efcke and our Benjamin (father of David) were related in some way; in fact, they were from the same generation of Bullers at Schwetz: the fourth generation after George and Dina. Beyond that, we can only wait and hope for additional archival information to come to light that permits us to trace the line between these two members of our larger family.