Franztal in Neumark 3

The first post in the Franztal series (here) recorded lease-holders for thirteen village plots in 1767, but the second post (here) complicated matters by listing a larger number of Mennonite families farming nineteen plots in 1793.

Zooming in on a 1936 map of the village, one can see the rough outlines of the village plots. The key is to focus on the line of houses stretching slightly upward from west to east across the lower third of the map: there appear to be between eighteen and twenty houses associated with narrow strips of land (the fields).

The layout of Franztal is less clear in the aerial photograph below, but the general organization and shape are still discernible.

The photograph is of Franztal today, but our interest is Franztal in 1805, the date of the next tax list available to us (Goertz and Goertz 1985, 48–49). Given the lack of correspondence between plot numbers and lease-holders in the first two Franztal lists, this post will simply list the data for 1805 all on its own. One note: the number that appears after each name refers to the size of the land-holding in Morgen (1 Morgen = .63 acre).

Lot 1

Maria (16) and Anna Buller (20)
Heinrich Buller widow (13) and Heinrich Hahn (10)

Lot 2

Heinrich Voth widow (21)
Peter Voth widow (20)
Benjamin Gans from Brenkenhoffswalde (14)

Lot 3

Heinrich Buller (17) and Benjamin Unruh (8)
Jacob Richert (23)
Tobias Sperling

Lot 4

Tens Voth Sr. (32)
Tens Voth Sr.
nunc (now): Remitz (6) Vorbruch [the village of Vorbruch was 1 mile north of Franztal]

Lot 5

Davied Dürcks (30) olim Gehrhard Dürcks (9)
Heinrich Dürcks (9)

Lot 6/7

Heinrich Voot (16)

nunc: Bernhardt Retzlaff (15)

Peter Gans Jr. olim Heinr. Buller (8)

Lot 8

Wilhelm Voth (15)
Heinrich Voth
nunc: Carl Hintz from Netzbruch (17)

Lot 9

Dens Voth Jr. (14)

Lot 10

Heinrich Dürcks Jr. (15)

Lot 11

Behrendt Voth (15)
Heinrich Dürcks (30) and Peter Dürcks (8)
Peter Gans Sr. olim Salomon Schmidt (10)
George Buller
nunc: V. Sack (8)

Lot 12

Benjamin Sperling (48)
Peter Gans Sr. (94 + 11)

Lot 13

Davied Voth (olim Andr. Voth 9) (119)
Jacob Bäcker Jr. (11)

Lot 14

Tomas Sperling (8) and Davied Voth (8)
Andreas Buller Jr. (10)
Heinrich Voth (10)
Benjamin Sperling olim Peter Gans Sr. (9)

Lot 15

Peter Bäcker (2)
Jacob Bäcker (12)
Benjamin Kanicke (9)
Friedr. Renith from Vorbruch (10)

Lot 16

Ludw. Jacob Harwig

Lot 17

Peter Gans Jr. (11)

Lot 18

Tobias Voth (11)

Lot 19

Joh. Fr. Kurtzweg (5) and Hamann (11)

Lot 20

Andreas Buller (16)

The 1767 Praestations-Tabel (tax list) named only one Buller: George (350); the 1793 list added two more: Heinrich and Andreas. Just twelve years later, this list names even more Bullers, including the first two female names we have seen on any of these lists.

1. We learned earlier that in 1793 Heinrich Buller leased plot 1, which was formerly held by George Buller. From this we developed the working hypothesis that Heinrich was George’s oldest son and took over the family lease when his father passed away.

Dramatic changes took place between 1793 and 1805. First, Heinrich died, leaving behind a widow who now controlled a part of the land. The fact that this woman is identified in terms of her relation to Heinrich (his widow) probably implies that she had not remarried at that time.

It is impossible to know exactly how old Heinrich was when he passed on, but we can surmise that he was a relatively young man. If he was born around 1765 (as implied toward the end of this post), he would have been forty at the oldest.

Heinrich’s age is important to keep in mind as we consider two other Bullers named as lease-holders of plot 1: Maria and Anna. As usual, we should be careful in the conclusions we draw, but the most natural explanation of this listing of female lease-holders is that they were unmarried daughters of Heinrich and his wife. If Heinrich was roughly twenty when he married, any children of his would have been twenty or younger in 1805.

Although we might not think of female daughters as eligible to inherit from their fathers, it appears that there was no restriction on the practice in Prussia at that time.* So, presumably Heinrich’s unmarried daughters inherited rights to the lease upon his death. To be clear, we do not know with certainty that Maria and Anna were Heinrich’s daughters, but there seems no other good explanation of why these unmarried Buller females held the lease jointly with Heinrich’s widow.

The three females held the lease to plot 1 jointly with Heinrich Hahn, whose appearance is a little less simple to explain. One wonders if Heinrich Hahn had married into the family and thus received the inheritance due to a third daughter. Of course, another equally plausible explanation is that Heinrich’s “estate” sold the part-lease to Hahn in order to generate cash.

2. Surprisingly, another Heinrich Buller appears on the list, as part-owner of plot 3 (with Benjamin Unruh and Jacob Richert). If you recall, that plot was jointly owned by Heinrich Buller, Cornelius Voot, and Jacob Richert in 1793. Clearly, this is not the same Heinrich whose heirs who possess plot 1, so it seems that we misinterpreted the 1793 list in the previous post. That is, in 1793 Franztal there were two Heinrich Bullers, not one who leased two properties.

Because plot 3 Heinrich leased land in 1793 (when plot 1 Heinrich would have been twenty-eight or so), plot 3 Heinrich was not a son of plot 1 Heinrich. Beyond that, we really know nothing. Who the “second” Heinrich was and where he came from is a mystery (for now). (Instead of going back and correcting the previous post, I will leave the text as is and consider this an adequate correction of the record.)

3. Lot 6/7 is reported to have been formerly (olim) owned by Heinrich Buller. Is this one of the two Franztal Heinrichs known to us or a third Heinrich Buller? It is impossible to tell.

4. Lot 11 introduces a different kind of mystery. It lists George Buller as associated with the plot but does not indicate any acreage. To work backward through this odd listing, one must ask whether the listing of an individual without any acreage indicates that the person lived in the house together with the other people listed for that plot but did not hold actual title to the lease. That must remain an open question for the time being, but it would accord with what we observed in the early 1700s, when the Mennonites of George Buller and Dina Thoms’s time often lived several families to a single house.

If that explanation is valid, then the next question that comes to mind is whether this is the original George Buller who settled Franztal in 1767. We assumed he was dead in 1793, but perhaps he had simply turned over the family lease to Heinrich and moved to another house. Assuming George 350 (in the Przechowka church book) was born around 1745, he would have been sixty at the time of this tax list, certainly not that old even for the early nineteenth century.

Of course, we have no reason to think that the George of plot 11 was George 350; it could have been any George Buller, of whom there seemed to be no shortage. For that matter, it could have been a son of George 350, although that strikes me as somewhat difficult to swallow.

5. Two Bullers remain: Andreas Buller of plot 20, and Andreas Buller Jr. of plot 14. It seems a safe hypothesis to identify the former as the 1793 owner of plot 14 and Jr. as his son. We do not know, as usual, that they were father and son, but it seems more than coincidental that one Andreas held lease to property in 1793 and that a second Andreas who is identified as Jr. held the lease to the same plot in 1805. That being said, it is a little troubling that lot 20 Andreas is not explicitly identified as Sr., as are others in this register. On balance, however, the evidence tilts in favor of father–son, in my view.

A great deal changed in the twelve years between 1793 and 1805: (1) Heinrich died and left the rights to property to his wife and two unmarried daughters whose names we now know: Maria and Anna (and maybe a son-in-law); (2) either George 350 reappeared in the records or a different George took up residence in the village; and (3) a second Andreas (most likely the son of the first one) established his own household in the same plot that the first Andreas had farmed twelve years earlier. In addition, the number of Buller families in the village had increased from one in 1767 to at least five in 1805, with a significant number of individuals. The Franztal Bullers were still not as numerous as the Voths, but they had grown substantially in the four decades of life in the village.

*****

* If Maria and Anna inherited the lease from their father Heinrich, it seems most likely that this took place before Prussian emperor Frederick William III’s 1801 Declaration that “only current Mennonite property owners and their legal male descendants” would be exempt from military service. Because military obligation was tied to the land, an unmarried daughter who inherited property after 1801 and then married would apparently obligate her new husband and any male children of theirs to provide military service whenever called upon to do so. This led, of course, to many Mennonites not passing property on to daughters, to avoid this unacceptable entanglement. Because Heinrich left property to his two daughters, and because he probably would not have done so if it would have resulted in their husbands and sons being forced to serve in the military, one might reasonably propose that Heinrich passed away before the emperor’s declaration in December 1801. See further Jantzen 2010, 66–72.

Works Cited

Goertz, Adalbert, and Bärbel Goertz. 1985. Mennonites of Neumark, Prussia, in 1805. Mennonite Family History 4:48–50.

Jantzen, Mark. 2010. Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.