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.