A scandal on the horizon

Looking through list after list may seem tedious at times, as we try to piece together and make sense of scraps of information. But every now and then the pieces fall into place, and we get a clear picture of an important, or at least interesting, event in the Buller family history.

There is just such an interesting revelation on the horizon—but first we must work through the same tax lists for Franztal as we did for Brenkenhoffswalde in the previous five posts. Once we finish those, we will be ready for a titillating tale about a Buller in one of the two villages.

Ultimately, of course, we hope to be able to draw connections between some Bullers in Neumark and others in the Schwetz area, Volhynia, the Molotchsna colony, and other places in between. In order to have any chance of doing that, we will need to keep in mind the Bullers we encountered in Brenkenhoffswalde and the ones we will encounter in Franztal.

Therefore, let us recap briefly the Bullers of Brenkenhoffswalde:

• Peter Buller Sr. is almost certainly number 351 in the Przechowka church book. According to the 1767 register, he was married and had two daughters and two sons. He appears again on the 1793 list but never after that. Presumably he died sometime between 1793 and 1805.


• Peter Buller Jr. is first listed on the 1793 list. Given the shared first name, it seems highly likely that he was the eldest son of Peter Sr. If so, then he was one of the sons counted on the 1767 list. Peter Jr. appears again on the 1805 and 1806 lists, but he is not on the 1826 register. Either he passed away before then, or, more likely, he moved to another location.


• Heinrich Buller also makes his first appearance on the 1793 list. It is reasonable to think that he was the other son of Peter Sr. counted on the 1767 list, but this is nothing more than a plausible guess. Like Peter Jr., he is listed again on the 1805 and 1806 registers, but he is not on the 1826 list. He likewise either passed away or moved from the plot that he had leased since 1793.


• Johann Buller makes a brief appearance in 1805 as one of two lease-holders of plot 9, but by 1806 he is gone. We know nothing about him beyond the fact that he was one of the earliest Bullers we know who was named Johann.

It is possible to guess at other details, and it is interesting to do so, provided that we remember that these are more hunches and hypotheses than demonstrable fact:

• Since Peter Sr. is on the 1767 tax list, he probably was part of the large group of Mennonites who emigrated from Jeziorka/the Schwetz area to Neumark in 1765 (see here). This explains the listing of Peter as 351 in the Przechowka church book.


• Peter Sr. and his wife had four children in 1767, which means the first was born no later than 1763. If Peter was around twenty-one at the birth of his first child, then we might estimate his date of birth around 1742, or, more generally, the early 1740s.


• Since Peter Sr. apparently died between 1793 and 1805, he was presumably at least fifty but not older than sixty-five when he passed away.


• All four children, of course, were born before 1767, so the two sons would have been at least twenty-six when they first appear in the 1793 register. This accords well with them establishing their own households (houses and farm plots) before 1793.


• The fact that the Przechowka church book does not record the name of Peter’s wife or list any of his children—in spite of the fact that at least two of the children had to have been born prior to the family’s departure from the Jeziorka/Schwetz area—is difficult to explain. Perhaps the Jeziorka Mennonites were only loosely connected with and involved in the church?


• If we take 1763–1767 as the time frame for the birth of Peter Jr. and Heinrich, we can project that they were around sixty at the time of the 1826 register. They could have passed on by that time, but that is not the best explanation, as will become scandalously evident later on.


• Johann Buller remains an enigma. He may have been part of the Peter Sr. larger family, either another son of Peter Sr. (but why was he not mentioned earlier?) or a firstborn son of Peter Jr. (a male born in 1763 could have had an adult male son in 1805). Given the lack of evidence,  however, it seems best to offer no hypotheses at all about who Johann was. 

Now that we have wrapped up the Brenkenhoffswalde Bullers, we are ready to tackle the Bullers of the nearby village, Franztal.