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.