Neumark to Molotschna: 1834 … and a scandal

Nearly a month ago we began our exploration of the Neumark (Neztebruch, Driesen, Brandenburg) area by noting not only the founding of Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal but also the end of their Mennonite inhabitation. Specifically, we discovered that, sixty-nine years after the founding of this Mennonite community (or congregation) in 1765, most of the residents of these two villages packed up their belongings, hitched up their livestock, and moved to the Molotschna colony (see here).

One would think, given what we learned about the lack of Bullers in the villages from the 1826 tax lists (see here and here), that no Bullers were involved in this Neumark to Molotschna immigration. However, Mennonite historians have collected and posted online records related to that emigration, and they reveal that there were at least five Bullers who made the trek.

We begin with a comprehensive listing of emigrants provided by Richard D. Thiessen (see here). The list is titled “Migration of Mennonites from Brandenburg, Prussia to Russia 1833–35,” which might indicate that there was not a single forty-family emigration in 1834 but several smaller ones over this period. Although the 1833 date is apparently the year when permission to emigrate was granted, this leaves open the possibility of one migration in 1834 and another in 1835. That being said, the precise course of events remains unclear.

The list is organized alphabetically by last name and also grouped into family units as much as is possible. Working through the list, one notices immediately that, although several individual Bullers are listed, no Buller families per se are recorded. Consistent with what we learned from the 1826 tax lists, all the Buller families had already left the region; only five individual Bullers remained.

Name	Age	Occupation	Place of Origin	Year
Baecker, nee Schmitt, Marie	65	widow Buller	Franzthal	1833
Buller, Heinrich	69		Brenkenhoffswalde	1833
Unruh, nee Buller, Helene	24	wife of Georg	Brenkenhoffswalde	1833
Buller, Heinrich	1	child of Helena Voth (illegitimate)	Brenkenhoffswalde	1833
Voth, nee Buller, Maria	34	wife of Benjamin	Franzthal	1835

Three of the Bullers were females who had married into other Mennonite families. Interestingly, one (Marie Baecker) was born a Schmitt, married a Buller first, then married a Baecker when her Buller husband (unknown to us) died. The other two females were a generation younger and no doubt were still in Neumark because their husbands chose to remain there.

Aerial view of the east end of Brenkenhoffswalde.

This leaves us with two male Bullers, both named Heinrich, whose existence as the only two male Bullers in this area probably tells a story and reveals a scandal all on its own. Heinrich the elder, sixty-nine years old, has neither wife nor occupation recorded. Heinrich the younger, one year old, was the illegitimate son of Helena Voth, twenty-two-year-old unmarried daughter of Benjamin Voth. The fact that both males are named Heinrich and that there is no other male Buller listed in the area who could have fathered the child suggests rather strongly that Heinrich the elder was Heinrich the younger’s biological father. I find it interesting that, in spite of the out-of-wedlock birth, the child was given the father’s last name even while living in the home of the mother along with her parents and siblings. Of course, we cannot be absolutely certain that Heinrich the elder was the only adult male Buller in the community, but the evidence does seem to tilt in that direction. Further, we cannot know beyond any doubt who Heinirch the elder was, although the facts would seem to point in a fairly clear direction (see further below).

A second historical resource, the “Register of the Distribution of Passports 19/31 March to 15/27 July 1834 for Settlement in the Mennonite colonies of Tauridia District” (Chaiderman 1997–1998) offers additional insight into the groupings of this migration (see further here). This Russian archival document lists twenty passports granted for emigration from the Neumark area in 1834.

Neither Marie Baecker nee Schmitt (widow Buller above) nor Maria Voth nee Buller are listed at all; Helene Unruh nee Buller is listed as the wife of Georg but is not identified as a Buller, which is not at all surprising. Beyond this, passport numbers 12–14 are of greatest interest to us.

12. Royal Prussian citizen, Mennonite, Benjamin Voth with wife Susanna, son Tobias, daughters Helena, Anna, Maria and Helena’s unlawfully born son, Heinrich Buller

13. Royal Prussian citizen, Mennonite, Ludwig Boettcher with wife Anna, daughters Maria, Anna, Wilhelmina, Henrietta, Amalie and Heinrich Buller

14. Royal Prussian citizen, Mennonite, Kornelius Voth with wife Sara, son in law Buller with wife Susanna, son Heinrich and grandson Johann Voth

Passport 12 lists the illegitimate Heinrich Buller the younger along with the rest of the family exactly as they appear in the first Thiessen list.

Passport 13 includes the Boettcher family and Heinrich Buller the elder. Although it might seem odd to see Heinrich grouped with an unrelated family on a single passport, this was probably the only way that Heinrich could lawfully leave, since “only families having at least five members” were permitted to leave (see Mannhardt 1953). Heinrich had no other family, so the Boettchers attached him to their family so that he could emigrate with the rest of the group.

Passport 14 complicates matters, since it does not correspond to the information in the Thiessen list. The passport lists husband and wife Kornelius and Sara Voth and their grandson Johann Voth; so far so good, since the Thiessen list matches. However, passport 14 also lists a son-in-law Buller and his wife Susanna. The fact that no first name is recorded for the son-in-law raises suspicion about the reliability of the translation here; a passport without a first name is hard to imagine. There are several Susanne Voths named in the Thiessen list, so presumably one of them is the one in view here. Could it be that the apparently orphaned brother and sister Peter (seventeen) and Susanna (fifteen) Voth are the two people intended here? Whatever the explanation, we cannot conclude based on the evidence that there was another male Buller in the group who emigrated from Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal to Molotschna colony.

This brings us back to Heinrich the elder. According to the first list, Heinrich was sixty-nine in 1833. This would put his birth year around 1764, just before Bullers first settled in Neumark. The list also locates Heinrich in Brenkenhoffswalde, which, if you recall, was the village in which Peter Buller 351 (in the Przechowka church book) and his family settled in 1767: Peter, his wife, their two daughters, and their two sons. Drawing upon the evidence of the later tax lists, from 1793 especially (see here), we suggested earlier that Peter’s two sons were named Peter Jr. and Heinrich. Of course, since Peter’s four children were recorded as being alive in 1767, they were all born prior to that year, and it would not surprise if Peter and his wife had a child sometime during 1764, the year when Heinrich the elder of 1833 Brenkenhoffswalde was born. As with most of our findings, certainty eludes us, but it seems more likely than not that the Heinrich Buller who came to Brenkenhoffswalde with his father Peter, his mother, and three siblings in the 1760s was the father of the illegitimate Heinrich Buller born to Helena Voth and that both Heinrichs, father and son, ended up at Gnadenfeld in Molotschna colony, which is where the Neumark group was emigrating.

What are we to make of all this, not just the scandal but the seventy years of Buller residency in the Neumark region? On the one hand, it is clear that Bullers lived in Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal during the entire time of its Mennonite inhabitation, from 1765 to 1834. On the other hand, it is just as obvious that all the Buller families left the area before 1834. When did they leave, and where did they go? Those are questions for continued research and future posts.

Works Cited

Chaiderman, Sergei, trans. 1997–1998. Russian Government Embassy in the City of Danzig: Register of the Distribution of Passports 19/31 March to 15/27 July 1834 for Settlement in the Mennonite colonies of Tauridia District. Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive File 362. State Archives of the Odessa Region (SAOR) Fond 89 Opis 1. Available online here.

Mannhardt, H. G. 1953. Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal (Lubusz Voivodeship, Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1953. Available online here.

Thiessen, Richard D. 2001. Migration of Mennonites from Brandenburg, Prussia to Russia 1833–35. Available online here.