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.