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.