Bullers in Deutsch-Wymysle 3

The previous post required more than a little concentration, as we tried to keep straight three different Peter Bullers and at least two Heinrichs. This post is a lot lower key—but still meaningful. We return to several questions asked earlier: When did the Bullers leave Neumark? Where did they go?

The answer to the second question is by now obvious, at least for the Bullers of Brenkenshoffswalde: many went to the Deutsch-Wymysle area. The answer to the first question is likewise becoming a bit clearer, again at least for the Brenkenshoffswalde clan. The evidence is right before our eyes.

As we noted in an earlier post (here), all the Bullers and Unruhs were gone from Brenkenhoffswalde by the 1826 land register. From that datum we know that the Bullers who lived in Brenkenhoffswalde in 1806 were gone twenty years later.

From the Deutsch-Wymysle records above, we can narrow the time frame considerably. If you recall, this is the register of Mennonites who came to Deutsch-Wymysle from the Neumark and Schwetz areas. All these Bullers were born somewhere other than Deutsch-Wymysle, which allows us to look at their dates of birth and the latest date a Buller was born in Brenkenhoffswalde (i.e, before all of the Bullers left that village).

The answer is easy to see: Heinrich 17 was born 14 March 1817 in Brenkenhoffswalde, which means that the Bullers did not move to Deutsch-Wymysle until sometime after that day. The time range of 1817–1826 is still rather large, but it is half what we started with. The other Deutsch-Wymysle lists that we will survey will no doubt narrow that gap further. Who knows? Maybe we will even be able to identify the very year the Brenkhoffswalde Bullers made the move.

Bullers in Deutsch-Wymysle 2

The previous post surveyed the first list of interest in Robert Foth’s copy of records from the Deutsch-Wymysle congregation: a register of all those people who moved to the church from some other place. Focusing on the Bullers listed, we noticed, among other things, that:

1. they were born between 1787 and 1817;
2. almost all were born in Brenkenhoffswalde;
3. they lived mostly in Deutsch-Wymysle; and
4. most also died in the Deutsch-Wymysle area.

Given the strong Brenkenhoffswalde connection of the Deutsch-Wymysle Bullers, it will be worth our while to return to our earlier posts on Brenkenhoffswalde in search of possible links between the Bullers in each locale.

We begin with the earliest Bullers born in Brenkenhoffswalde, according to the Deutsch-Wymysle records. There is a noteworthy gap between the first five Bullers (1799 and earlier) and the eleven who follow (all 1805 and after), which allows us to treat these five as probable members of the same generation. Listed in chronological order, these five Bullers are (numbers refer to the church-record numbers shown here):

Number	First Name	Date of Birth
20	Heinrich	12 April 1787
15	Peter	21 August 1789
16	Helene	22 August 1790
26	Tobias I	25 August 1791
25	Kornelius	27 January 1799

Is it possible to say more about who these Bullers were? I think it is. If you recall, the land registers for Brenkenhoffswalde listed a number of Bullers. We began in 1767 with Peter Buller (351 in the Przechowka church book), then added his son Peter Jr. and a Heinrich Buller (whom we suggested could be a second son) in 1793. Peter Sr. (351) was gone by the 1805 and 1806 registers, but Peter Jr. and Heinrich remained. However, all Bullers were gone by the time of the 1826 Praestations-Tabel (land-tax list).

With full admission of the tentative nature of the suggestions that follow, let us see how we might reasonably arrange and make sense of these several strands of evidence. If it is correct to think that Peter Sr. (351) had an older son named Peter Jr. and a younger son named Heinrich, we can reason through the evidence as follows.

1. The 1793 land register lists Peter Jr. and Heinrich as lease holders. Obviously, the Heinrich and Peter listed in the Deutsch-Wymysle were too young (ages four and six) at that time to permit any sort of one-to-one identification between the two lists.

2. That being said, it is striking that both lists contain Bullers named Peter and Heinrich. Not to be missed is the fact that Peter is in the 1793 land list is presumably older than Heinrich (Peter was the firstborn, apparently, named after his father), whereas Heinrich in the Deutsch-Wymysle records is the older by two years.

3. Given the propensity of Mennonite males of that era to name their firstborn sons after themselves, one might expect Deutsch-Wymysle Heinrich’s father to have been named Heinrich as well. To state the matter differently, one would not expect a firstborn son named Heinrich to have been fathered by someone named Peter.

4. In light of all this, it is reasonable to think that Deutsch-Wymysle Heinrich was the firstborn son of Brenkenhoffswalde Heinrich, son of Peter Sr. (351). We certainly do not know this to be a fact, but it is a reasonable explanation of what we know (but see the second note below).

5. With this as a working hypothesis, we turn our attention to the identity of the next two Bullers in the table above: Peter 15 and Helene 16. Both were born Bullers, and they were married to each other (note the shared wedding date here). We can safely assume that they were not brother and sister, but it would not surprise if they were cousins, if one was the child of Peter Jr. and the other of Heinrich. As before, this is nothing more than an intriguing hypothesis awaiting further evidence.

6. We can say little about Tobias I and Kornelius. I do not recall seeing these first names used with Bullers before, although both were used with other Mennonite families in Brenkenhoffswalde (e.g., Tobias Sperling, Tobias Voot/Voth, Cornelius Vood/Voot/Voth).

7. Finally, it is worth noting that none of these Bullers shared a birth year, which is what one might expect from a small number of families (as few as two) having children. If there were four or five different families having children, it would be highly likely that some children would be born the same year. This observation is not dispositive in and of itself, but it is consistent with the picture we sketched out based on other evidence.

So, what might (!) we conclude? A reasonable working hypothesis is that (1) these five Bullers born in Brenkenhoffswalde were born into the only two families known to have lived in the village at this time: Peter Jr. and Heinrich, the two sons of Peter Buller 351; (2) the Heinrich Buller born in 1787 was the firstborn son of Heinrich son of Peter 351; (3) Peter born in 1789 and Helene of 1790 were cousins who married (one a child of Peter Jr., the other of Heinrich son of Peter 351), which was not unusual in that setting; and (4) Tobias I and Kornelius were younger siblings in these two Brenkenhoffswalde Buller families.

There is much more that we can draw from the information recorded in this first Deutsch-Wymysle list, but this is enough for now. The following post will return to a question asked earlier, during our initial explorations of the Neumark Bullers.


Notes

* The known chronology works out well for Heinrich 1787 being the son of Heinrich son of Peter 351. As noted earlier, the 1767 register states that Peter 351 had two sons (and two daughters): Peter Jr. and, probably, Heinrich. That second son had to be born no later than 1767, so he would have been at least twenty when Heinrich 1787 was born, perhaps several years older. That would be a normal age for someone in that context to have had his first son, whom he would probably have given his own name. Again, this coherence proves nothing, but it is suggestive.

* We should not forget that Heinrich son of Peter 351 is thought to have fathered the illegitimate son of Helena Voth in 1833 or thereabouts (see here). Supposing that Heinrich son of Peter 351 was the father of Heinrich 1787 and of Heinrich the illegitimate child does raise several questions: When a child was born out of wedlock, who typically named it? (My hunch is that the mother or her family gave the name, but that is merely a hunch.) If the father, would he give the child the same name as had been given to a previous son who was still living? (I can imagine a father estranged from his first son might do so.) The story of Heinrich son of Peter 351 is not yet finished; we will have occasion to return to him again later on in our explorations of Deutsch-Wymysle.

An intriguing find

Even though most of our exploration involves scouring archives and records, every now and then a material artifact, some physical object, pops up and begs to be noticed. This happened last night with the Catalogue of Monuments of Dutch Colonization in Poland (here). While casually reading the descriptions of several villages near Deutsch-Wymysle and then examining the drawings and photographs that illustrate the text, a headstone from the Sady cemetery caught my eye. Can you see what is striking about this object?

Most of the text is clear:

Here lies (rests) so-and-so
Born 22 (?) July 1865
Died 10 October 1932
May his remains (ashes) rest in peace

The important part of all this is the identity of the so-and-so: Jacob Zilke. The last name is strikingly similar to that of Helena Zielke, wife of David Buller. In fact, given the variability of spellings at the time, one might reasonably think that the names are not merely similar but the same.

To be clear, there is no reason to think that Jacob Zilke, born in 1865, was a direct relative of Helena, who died a decade before Jacob was born. However, given the fact that Sady was for a time home to a Mennonite population (it is unclear for how long), it is conceivable that Jacob Zilke had some sort of family connection to the Mennonite Helena Zielke who is one of our ancestors. At the very least, it is worth noticing and tucking away in case we encounter more information about the Zielke family.

Bullers in Deutsch-Wymysle 1

The evidence for Bullers in Deutsch-Wymysle stems primarily from a twentieth-century handwritten work known as “The History of the Mennonites of Deutsch-Wymysle, Poland” (Die Geschichte der Mennoniten zu Deutsch = Wymyschle - Polen). This work was composed by someone we met in the last post: Robert Foth. If you recall, Foth wrote the GAMEO article on Deutsch-Wymysle (see also Foth 1968), since he is frequently considered to be an authority on all things Deutsch-Wymysle: his family had been in the church for generations, and it is my impression that he was a member of the church up until the very end, that is, until the church closed in the mid-twentieth century. (Page scans of the Foth book are available here.)

Foth’s history of the church seems to incorporate material from the original church records, listing dates of birth, baptism, marriage, and death, as well as villages of birth and of residence and other information of genealogical interest. However, the information is not presented in a running list, as we have seen with the Przechowka church book. Rather, Foth’s history intersperses archival records with his story of the church’s history: he offers both data and interpretation.

Interesting as his narrative may be (e.g., he tells of the church’s experience of World War II from an apparently firsthand perspective), it is the records that are of most interest to us, so that is where our attention will be directed. Foth arranges these records in various forms, for example, a register of the Mennonites who moved to Deutsch-Wymysle from West Prussia and Neumark or a different list of Mennonites who left Deutsch-Wymysle for some other country (e.g., Russia, the United States).

Each list deserves its own examination, so we begin with the first list in the book: Verzeichnis der nach Dt. Wymyschle eingewanderten Mennoniten aus Westpreußen und der Neumark (List of Mennonites Who Moved to Deutsch-Wymysle from West Prussia and Neumark). Seven pages list 234 persons in alphabetical order by last name (e.g., all the Balzers, followed by the Bartels, Blocks, Bullers, and so on).

Foth’s History of the Mennonites of Deutsch-Wymysle, Poland, page 9. 

We will make observations about the entire list a little later; for now our interest is with the Bullers in the church. Which Bullers moved to the Deutsch-Wymysle vicinity and joined the church there? The closeup of the scan below will provide all the answers.

Numbers 14–29 are Bullers either by birth or by marriage, sixteen in all (i.e., 6.8 percent of the 234 people listed). Since our interest is in Bullers by birth, we should exclude the five women who were Bullers by marriage: numbers 14, 19, 24, 27, and 29. This takes us down to eleven Bullers.

On the other hand, the list also contains six women who were born Buller but are now listed under a husband’s last name: (9) Katharina Buller Block, (93) Susanna Buller Kliewer, (126) Helene Buller Nachtigall, (127) Eva Buller Nachtigall (Helene and Eva were married to the same man), (162) Helene Buller Ratzlaff, and (209) Susanna Buller Unruh. This increases our total to seventeen Bullers by birth who moved to the church at Deutsch-Wymysle.

What can we observe about them?

1. The birth years recorded stretch from 1787 through 1817: 1787, 1789, 1790, 1781, 1799, 1805, 1806, 1808, 1809, 1813, 1814, 1815, 1816 (two), 1817, and two unknown. It would not be surprising if the four born earliest were parents of most or even all of the six born last (from 1813 on).

2. The place of birth is not known for two Bullers (9 and 162). Of the remaining fifteen, thirteen are said to have been born in Brenkenhoffswalde, the Mennonite village in the Neumark that captured our attention for a number of posts. The remaining two (126 and 127) were born in Ostrower Kämpe, a small village near the Przechowka church (F in the map here). Thus, until other evidence indicates otherwise, we can assume that the majority of the Bullers in the Deutsch-Wymysle church came from the Neumark village of Brenkenhoffswalde.

3. The primary village of residence is unknown for the same two Bullers (9 and 162) whose place of birth was unknown. Most of the remaining Bullers lived in Deutsch-Wymysle itself: 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 28, 93, and 209. However, some lived in one of the other small villages nearby: Wonsosz, Sady, Leonow, and Deutsch Zyck. What united them was their membership in the same Mennonite church, which was located in Deutsch-Wymysle.

Fragment of a wooden cross in the Deutsch-Wymysle
cemetery. Photograph by Jutta Dennerlein, 2005 (here).

4. The listing of a precise date of death would lead one to think that a person remained in the church all of his or her life. This notion may be supported by the explanatory notes provided when no date of death is given. For example, Heinrich Buller 28 and his wife Anna Penner Buller 29 do not have dates of death listed, only the note: moved to Russia in 1858 (Zogen 1858 nach Russland). So also Eva Buller Nachtigall 127 and Susanna Buller Unruh 2090 lack dates of death and are reported to have moved to Russia. This explanation makes sense, although one should also note one exception: Heinrich Buller 17 is said to have moved to Gnadenfeld (in Molotschna colony) and died unmarried, and his date of death is given. Nevertheless, for the most part it seems safe to think that the Bullers recorded with a date of death and no further indication of leaving probably lived out their days in the Deutsch-Wymysle area.

5. Speaking of dates of death, they range from 1838 (Helene Buller Nachtigall 126, who died at the age of twenty-nine) through 1871 (Heinrich 17 in Gnadenfeld): 1838, 1841, 1846, 1855 (two), 1856 (two), 1860, 1861, 1871, and four unknown.

6. It is easy enough to identify married couples (they share the same date of marriage): 15 + 16, 18 + 19, 23 + 24, 26 + 27, and 28 + 29. Two Bullers are listed as never married: Heinrich 17 and Kornelius 25; in both cases the marriage slot contains the note that they died unmarried (starb ledig). Finally, one wonders if Heinrich 20 has a marriage date listed but no spouse because his wife passed away before he moved from Brenkenhoffswalde to Deutsch-Wymysle. This explanation does not work for Benjamin 22 (he was married after leaving Brenkenshoffswalde), so his listing of a marriage date but no spouse must remain a mystery for the present.

We seemed to have mined this vein as completely as we can for the time being, so the next post or two will draw some conclusions from this data for our developing history of the larger Buller family, as well as for our understanding of the Deutsch-Wymysle church in general.

Works Cited

The Cemetery of Nowe Wymyśle. Page in the UpstreamVistula.org website. For additional pictures, background information, and further bibliography, see here.

Foth, Robert. 1968. Aufzeichnungen über das Leben der Mennoniten- und MB-Gemeinde zu Wymyschle, Polen. Mennonitische Rundschau 29 May.

Deutsch-Wymysle 1

Now that we have laid a proper historical and social background to Mennonite settlement in Poland as one element of a larger colonization and reclamation project undertaken by the Olędrzy, we are ready to focus our attention on a particular village in which some Bullers lived and died and were buried: Deutsch-Wymysle.

As previously noted, the village was in the historical Polish region known as Mazovia (or Masovia; Polish: Mazowsze); the location of Deutsch-Wymysle in Mazovia is indicated by the asterisk in the map below. We might also notice the general location of the Schwetz/Przechowka community, which was in an adjoining region known as Kujawy (or Kuyavia); the asterisk above “Kuyavia” provides the approximate location of that Mennonite center.

Map modified from original created by Winnetou14. See further here.

According to some authorities, there was a close relation between the Przechowka church and the one established later at Deutsch-Wymysle (modern Nowe Wymyśle). For example, Robert Foth writes:

In 1762 Mennonite emigrants from the West Prussian congregations of Przechovka near Schwetz and of Montau-Gruppe near Graudenz made their way upstream into Poland and settled in the province of Warsaw, district Gostynin, not far from the town of Gombin (Gabin), and founded the Deutsch-Wymysle village and congregation. In 1764 a second group arrived from Przechovka.

Peter J. Klassen offers a similar account:

Farther up the river from Thorn, not far from the city of Plock, another congregation developed, with members from a number of nearby villages. This church was located in Deutsch (Nowe) Wymyśle. In the 1760s some Mennonite families emigrated here from Przechówka, the Gruppe-Montau region, and elsewhere, and established a new congregation in Wymyśle. (2009, 95)

Others, however, tell a different story. According to the Nowe Wymyśle entry in the Catalogue of Monuments of Dutch Colonization in Poland (see here),

The village was founded by Kajeten Dębowski in 1781 and was settled by: Jakub Konarski, Jerzy Drews, Jan Konarski, Jan Goln, and Dawid Górski. Under the agreement, the colonists undertook to clear the forest on the assigned area (half a włóka per colonist [roughly 22 acres]). They were granted a 7 year rent-free period in exchange. After the land had been cleared, its acreage was measured in order to determine the settlers’ duties. The contract also provided for extensive legal and governmental autonomy. They were under the direct judicial authority of the district courts and were outside of the landowners’ jurisdiction.

Although the village initially was settled by the Evangelical [i.e., German Lutheran] colonists it constituted one of the three most important Mennonite centers in Mazowsze for many decades. The Mennonite community was established in 1813 by settlers who moved here from villages located near the Vistula (e.g. Sady). 

Aerial view of modern Nowe Wymyśle.

There really is no reconciling the two histories of the founding of the village: one version states that Mennonite groups founded the village and congregation in the early 1760s; the other reports that the village was founded in 1781 by a particular individual* and initially settled by five German Lutheran families; it was only later that the Mennonites settled in the already-established village and formed a new congregation there.

We will return to the question of the founding of Deutsch-Wymysle as time and abilities permit. For now let me say simply that the better evidence and arguments seem to come from the second explanation. Robert Foth, the main advocate of the first version, is clearly familiar with Deutsch-Wymysle: his family lived there, and he has provided the copy of the church records that we will begin exploring in future posts. That being said, his view seems to rest more on the oral tradition passed on over the last two centuries than on documentary evidence.

The attribution of Deutsch-Wymysle’s founding to the Polish noble Kajeten Dębowski and German Lutheran Olędrzy (see here), on the other hand, appears better supported by the historical record, as argued by Wojciech Marchlewski (1986) and Erich L. Ratzlaff (1971). In the first place, an argument that names the actual individuals involved is more compelling than one that refers vaguely to certain groups performing the same actions. This explanation is also supported by contemporary government documents and comports well with what we learned of the Olędrzy: it is perfectly reasonable that one group of Olędrzy (German Lutherans, or Evangelicals, as they are often called) founded the village and reclaimed the land, then sold the leases to another group of Olędrzy, namely, Mennonites, which included some Bullers. These Mennonites may have entered the area and purchased leases gradually over the course of several decades, which would account for a community memory of being in the area from the beginning, so to speak; nevertheless, we should not confuse Mennonite presence with a Mennonite founding of the village or the establishment of a church in the eighteenth century.

Why raise this question now? As we look at the record of Bullers and other Mennonites in Deutsch-Wymysle, we should ask if the evidence tilts us toward one explanation or another as to the founding of Deutsch-Wymysle and the first Mennonite presence there.

Note

* Apparently Kajeten Dębowski was the Polish noble who owned the land; he leased it to the five named Olędrzy for development.


Works Cited

Foth, Robert. 1956. Deutsch-Wymysle (Masovian Voivodeship, Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1956. Available online here.

Klassen, Peter J. 2009. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marchlewski, Wojciech. 1986. Mennonici w Polsce (o powstaniu społeczności mennonitów Wymyśla Nowego) [The Mennonites in Poland (The Origins of the Mennonite Community in Wymyśle Nowe)]. Etnografia Polska 30:129–46. Available online here.

Ratzlaff, Erich L. 1971. Im Weichselbogen: Mennonitensiedlungen in Zentralpolen. Winnipeg: Christian Press.

Who were the Olędrzy?

Although we planned to narrow our focus to the single village Deutsch-Wymysle, it seems best, upon reflection, to keep our field of vision wide for at least one more post. The context will prove helpful in the long run as we weigh competing claims about who actually founded Deutsch-Wymysle in the first place.

The plural term “Olędrzy” in the post title is a new one, but its singular form (Olęder) and variations (also Holenders or Holęder; German: Holländer or Hauländer) hints at its meaning: it has something to do with people from Holland. In fact, the Olędrzy were people who emigrated  to Poland and lived in villages “organized under a particular type of law” (here).

A typical Olędrzy house, this one built between 1800 and 1825.

The law under which they were organized is by now familiar to us: they enjoyed personal freedom (they were not serfs), community self-government, the granting of long-term (typically forty years) leases to the land, and the right to pass on the rights of the lease to heirs. As one might expect, Dutch Mennonites constituted a sizable percentage of the early Olędrzy, but we should not mistakenly think that all Olędrzy were Mennonites.

This was especially true as time went on, and eventually the term came to be applied to any group of colonists, regardless of their ethnicity, who lived and worked as the earliest Oledrzy had done. So it was that many Germans and Poles, as well as some Hungarians, Czechs, and Scots, also settled in Poland and enjoyed the privileges of the law first extended to the original Dutch Olędrzy. From the beginning of Olęder immigration in the 1500s through 1864, at least 1,700 Olęder villages were established;* only 300 were settled by ethnic Dutch (here), which gives a good sense of how the ethnic composition of the Olędrzy shifted over the centuries.

The original Olędrzy were welcomed into Poland for a simple reason: to turn unprofitable riverland into productive farmland. Jerzy Szaùygin writes:

They were always settled either along rivers, or in lowland and marshy areas. Due to their centuries-old experience in fighting the floods in their native country, the colonists were able to turn barren land, seemingly unsuitable for cultivation, into a state of flourishing agriculture. They achieved this by establishing a complex system of channels, dams, and weirs. Based on cattle-raising and fruit farming, their agriculture was characterized by good work organization, and was much more advanced and productive than that of the local serfs. Therefore, the colonization of the previously uncultivated land was of great benefit to the local landowners.

The means by which the original Dutch and then their heirs reclaimed the land will be the subject of another post. For now we end by emphasizing several important points.

1. When the colonists of Poland are identified as Olędrzy or “the Dutch,” one should not assume that the colonists’ ethnic background is in view. Especially for the mid-eighteenth century on, the term is more probably a reference to a specific legal status and way of life, that of free people reclaiming and farming land from Poland’s river bottoms.

2. Although all Mennonites were Olędrzy (speaking loosely), not all Olędrzy were Mennonites. In fact, the largest numbers of Olędrzy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries apparently were German Lutherans, often called “Evangelicals” in the literature. Naturally, the Mennonites typically lived in their villages and the Lutherans in theirs, but both were considered part of the Olędrzy class.

All of this background, but especially these final observations, will be helpful as we finally turn our attention to the village of Deutsch-Wymysle in the following post.


Note
* Nearly two hundred Olęder settlements were established in the Mazovia (Mazowsze) region; this ratio (200/1,700) offers evidence that Olęder settlement was a widespread phenomenon throughout Poland, not merely a regional development.

Works Cited

Olędrzy. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Available online here.

Szaùygin, Jerzy. Introduction to Catalogue of Monuments of Dutch Colonization in Poland. Available online here or here.

New territory

Buller Time continues to explore new territory, both geographically and genealogically, in search of not only our own direct ancestors but any Buller who forms part of our larger family. Over the past few years we have traveled back from Lushton, Nebraska, to the high plains of south Russia (modern Ukraine), to a Mennonite colony known as Molotschna. There that we learned not only of the village life that David and Peter D enjoyed but also of the land crisis that prompted Peter and Sarah to lead their family to a new life in a new world.

From Molotschna and its villages we took another step back in time and traveled to the northwest, to the historical region known as Volhynia, where David and his now-found father and mother Benjamin and Helena lived early in the nineteenth century.

Learning there that Volhynian Mennonites typically came from either the Schwetz area of Poland or the Neumark region of Prussia, we invested considerable time exploring those two locales. We returned time and again to the Mennonite church at Przechowka, a few miles southwest of Schwetz, and especially to its church book that records so many of our family’s names.

Most recently we spent considerable time in the Neumark (aka Netzebruch, Driesen, Brandenburg) villages of Neu Dessau, Brenkenhoffswalde, and Franztal, tracing several Bullers from there back to Schwetz and others forward to Volhynia. Having extracted all we can from that mine of information, it is time to move on to a new locale.

From (1) Molotschna we moved northwest to (2) Volhynia, whose Mennonite residents
came largely from (3) the Schwetz (Przechowka) area and (4) the Neumark region.

From the villages of Neumark (located only 100 miles east of Berlin, Germany) we travel 160 miles to the east–southeast and back into Poland. Warsaw lies along the Vistula only 50 miles further to the southeast. The village that interests us is Deutsch-Wymysle (modern Nowe Wymyśle), a Mennonite outpost in the early nineteenth century.

Schwetz/Przechowka is in the upper left, Deutsch-Wymysle is the red pin in the lower center, circa 85 miles to the south–southeast.

We will take plenty of time to learn about the area and especially the Bullers who lived there (this was the village, after all, into which Karl Buller was born in 1826), but for now a few general observations will suffice.

First, the spread of the Mennonite presence in Poland was from north to south and primarily along the Vistula River. The earliest Mennonites in Poland, we have seen, settled around Danzig (Gdańsk) and then into the large delta where the Vistula and its tributaries emptied into the Baltic Sea. It was here that most Dutch Mennonites (none of our family, as far as we know) made their mark by draining the lowlands around the river and turning it into productive farmland. From that time on Mennonites, as well as other groups (more on that in a future post), moved steadily upstream and did the same with the lowlands on both sides of the Vistula.

Why is this important to notice? It was only natural that various Mennonite groups, including Bullers, moved farther upstream and established Deutsch-Wymysle. The Schwetz and Torun areas were now being farmed, but virgin territory remained to be put into production. Simply stated, the move to this new area to found a new village was simply a matter of going where work remained to be done.

Second, this move led our family to a new area in Poland: Mazovia (Polish: Mazowsze). The modern Mazovian Voivodeship (i.e., province) corresponds roughly to the historical area with which we are concerned. As a result of the late eighteenth-century partitions of Poland, the greater part of Mazovia was incorporated into the Prussian Empire.

Prussian domination was short-lived, however, and in 1807 Mazovia became part of the Duchy of Warsaw, which was a Polish state Napoleon established after he had defeated the Prussians. Even this was not the end of the matter. Eight years later Mazovia became part of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, a state that was allied with, dependent on, and ultimately absorbed into the Russian Empire.

As we explore the life of Bullers in Mazovia further, it will be important to keep in mind not only the geographical setting (upstream from Schwetz along the Vistula) but also the historical context (a time of power shifts from Poland to Prussia to Poland to Russia) in which our ancestors lived, since both their lives and their journeys were no doubt influenced by the political changes taking place all around them. These Mennonites may have lived as the “quiet in the land” (a favored Mennonite self-designation), but the land itself was anything but quiet during these tumultuous times.

With that as a broad and general background, we are ready to narrow our focus onto the village in which we will next find Bullers: Deutsch-Wymysle, on the south side of the Vistula River.

Who was the first?

Research does not have to be serious and focused all the time; on occasion it can be borderline frivolous and little more than fun, more akin to surfing the Web than engaging in sober study. For example, recently a question came to mind that prompted a fun bit of research: Who was the first Carl Buller?

We all know and love our family’s current Carl Buller (Happy Father’s Day, Dad!), but who was the first? There is only one place to find the answer to that kind of question: the GRANDMA database—so off to the database I went. The answer was just a few clicks away.

Ignoring all the Bullers named Charles (GRANDMA returns alternate spellings if a searcher wants) and the Carls and Karls named Buhler or Buehler, it was easy to see that the earliest Carl/Karl Buller was GRANDMA number 28456. One click from the results screen, and we were at the page for Karl Buller 28456.

Born 10 March 1826 in Deutsch-Wymysle, Prussia, Karl was the son of Tobias and Anna Foth Buller. To put this in a more precise historical context, Karl Buller was nine years younger than David father of Peter D.

The reference to Deutsch-Wymysle, Prussia, was a new one, so I decided to explore further, beginning with Robert Foth’s 1956 article on the village in GAMEO. We will return to the village history and location later (a number of posts of interest to Bullers will arise out of this information); for now we jump ahead in the story to a twentieth-century handwritten copy of the original church records (which were apparently lost in a fire), which provides us additional details about Karl Buller 28456.

There listed plain as day is the first Karl (also the firstborn of his parents), born 10 March 1826 in the village of Deutsch-Wymysle and married (we know not to whom) on 14 August 1854. The last column records the place of his death, which is by now well known to all of us: Volhynia.

We have only scratched the surface of what lies waiting to be discovered in Deutsch-Wymysle (note, for example, where Karl’s parents were born), but it is enough for now. Sometimes even fun and frivolous research, such as a search for the first Carl/Karl Buller, leads us in unexpected and rewarding directions. That is certainly the case in this instance, so Buller Time will now leave Neumark behind (sort of) and move back into Poland in search of more pieces of the puzzle in our larger Buller family history.

Work Cited

Foth, Robert. 1956. Deutsch-Wymysle (Masovian Voivodeship, Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Happy belated birthday, Buller Time!

Better late than never, I would like to note for Buller Time’s tens (ha!) of readers the recently passed second birthday of the blog. The first two posts were made on 15 June 2014 and consisted primarily of two pictures: a Mennonite barn in Molotschna colony (here) and the nineteenth-century windmill located on the outskirts of Alexanderkrone, where Peter D and family lived for a few years (here).

All told, Buller Time has published 291 posts—in spite of the great hiatus of 2015. Thanks to all who show interest and support by visiting and reading and occasionally (!) commenting. According to Blogger, Buller Time has been visited 15,373 times since its launch. My own daily records show that around 25 people visit each day. Not bad for a bunch of often-landless hicks from Switzerland (?) by way of Poland and Volhynia and Molotschna and Lushton!

Thanks most of all to our ancestors, especially Grandpa Chris and Grandma Malinda, who not only gave us all life but also inspired the creation of this blog.

Mennonites in Neumark 3

The first posts in this mini-series addressed when and why Mennonites moved to the Neumark (aka Netzebruch, Driesen, Brandenburg) area, as well as what life, especially church life, was like for the Bullers and other families who populated the villages of Fraztal and Brenkenhoffswalde. This final post looks to the end of Mennonite habitation in the region, in an attempt to understand why so many families left in the early decades of the 1800s, culminating in the exodus of nearly all Mennonites in 1834.

As is so often the case, historical context helps us understand our ancestors’ lives and choices. Surprisingly enough, our story begins with Napoleon. As the History Channel so capably summarizes (here), Napoleon was a French military officer during the time of the French Revolution (1789–1799) who rose through the ranks far beyond his peers until he was appointed commander of the entire military in 1796. Three years later he engineered a coup that set him at the top of the French Republic. Eventually, in 1804, the Senate declared him Emperor of the French.

Even when he was fighting on behalf of the revolution, Napoleon sought to conquer territory far beyond what many would consider traditional French territory. Nothing changed in that regard when Napoleon became emperor. If anything, his quest to expand French control only increased.

Of course, the other powers and nations of the day did not wish to serve a French emperor, so both individually and, more often, in alliance they battled Napoleon wherever his armies sought to go. The coalition that interests us most is the fourth, which included Britain, Prussia, Russia, Saxony, and Sweden and spanned the years 1806–1807.

What is of most interest to Mennonites and us Bullers happened during these years. In August 1806 the Prussian king Frederick William III, for reasons not entirely understood, went to war against Napoleon all on his own, with no help from his coalition partners or his military ally Russia. The results were devastating. In the space of nineteen days the Prussian army of 250,000 was literally decimated through the deaths of 10 percent of its soldiers; another 150,000 were taken as prisoners, as well as 4,000 artillery pieces and over 100,000 muskets (see here).

Not only was the Prussian army destroyed completely as an effective fighting force, but Napoleon also added Prussian territory to his realm. The effect of all this on the psyche of the Prussian/German people was devastating, and it prompted the Prussians, after Napoleon’s advance was turned back and his power weakened by the Russians in 1812, to rebuild their offensive might as fully as possible and to add to that a second layer of military capability available for protecting Prussian home territory.

Soldier of the Prussian Landwehr

The means used to accomplish the latter was the Landwehr (literally, country defense) of 1813. This royal edict mandated that all males living in Prussia between the ages of eighteen and forty-five who were not already serving in the regular army were to be conscripted (drafted) into special units dedicated primarily to defending the homeland. The key thing to note here is that all males of this age were registered for service—including Mennonites.

As might be expected, the edict was enforced with different degrees of rigor in different regions and likewise encountered different Mennonite responses from place to place. Some government officials overlooked Mennonites who did not comply, while others sought to register every last male. Some Mennonites refused to be registered at all (even though registration did not automatically lead to military service), while others adhered to the law. Of interest to us is Adalbert Goertz’s record of registrations for the Schwetz district, which reveals that all males regardless of their age were registered, including Jacob Buller, 56; Heinrich Buller, 26; Jacob Buller, 9 (all from Przechowka); and Jacob Buller, 45 (Ostrowo Kämpe; see here, table 8).

Although it seems that only a few Mennonites actually saw action, and that generally voluntarily, the proverbial writing was on the wall. The long-standing exclusion of Mennonites from military service was slowly but surely eroding.

It is probably no coincidence that Mennonites—and Bullers—in the Neumark and the Schwetz areas began to immigrate east to Volhynia and Russia during the following several decades. Indeed, all but a handful of members of the Przechowka church moved to the Molotschna colony in 1819–1820 and 1823–1824. As we noted previously (here and here), all the Buller families likewise disappeared from the Neumark area between 1806 and 1826. The most reasonable explanation is found in the growing movement toward universal conscription (i.e., all males subject to the draft) within Prussia during this time. (There is no better account of this development than that found in Jantzen 2010.)

The Mennonites who left in the 1810s and 1820s were shown to have acted wisely in the early 1830s, which is when we take up the story with regard to Neumark (this is not to say that other Mennonite areas were unaffected; they were, but our concern is Neumark). On 16 May 1830, the Mennonite Edict of 1789, which previously had been operative only for the province of Prussia (not the entire Prussian kingdom), was extended to West Prussia (i.e., including Neumark and the Schwetz area) as well. Stated simply, this edict gave Mennonites a choice: serve in the military, like all other Prussians, or pay an extra tax and suffer the loss of some civil rights, including the right to buy land that was nonexempt (i.e., that carried the responsibility of military service).

The extension of the edict’s terms over the Neumark area met with stiff opposition, as “all forty-three heads of household [in Brenkenhoffswalde] went on record as rejecting the option of serving in the military” (Jantzen 2010, 115). When officials attempted to collect the additional taxes and to limit the sale of property according to the terms of the edict, the Mennonites appealed to Frederick William III to uphold the terms of their charter. Frederick “said that he would like to help the Mennonites, but he could not exempt them from the obligations borne by other citizens” (Klassen 2009, 87)

Over the course of the next few years, therefore, the Neumark Mennonite communities arranged to leave their home of seventy years behind. Elder Wilhelm Lange (here) negotiated permission with the Russian government for forty Mennonite families to emigrate to the Molotschna colony, and so it was that

in the summer of 1834 twenty-eight Mennonite families and ten Lutheran families who had joined them left for Russia. There they established the community and congregation of Gnadenfeld. Just as this group had transmitted important impulses from the Awakening movement to the Vistula Mennonites, now too their congregation became a transmission belt for infusing Mennonites in Russia with new attitudes toward missions, education, and spiritual renewal. (Jantzen 2010, 117)

As noted earlier (here), these “new attitudes” played a key role in the development of the Mennonite Brethren movement during the middle of the nineteenth century.

Although the spirit and values and descendants of the Neumark Mennonites lived on in Molotschna and far beyond, the community ceased to exist in 1834. There are no doubt Bullers buried in and around the villages of Neu Dessau, Franztal, and Brenkenhoffswalde. Their headstones are no doubt gone and their graves forgotten, but we have resurrected some of their names from obscurity, and we will continue to do the same for other Bullers who are part of our larger family.

Works Cited

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

Klassen, Peter J. 2009. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mennonites in Neumark 2

The initial post about the Neumark (aka Brandenburg, Driesen, or Netzebruch) Mennonites surveyed the beginnings of the settlement and sought to answer questions related to the emigration: When did the emigration occur? From where did the Mennonite families come? Why did they wish to move? A followup post addressed two additional questions: Why did the Prussian officials want the Mennonites to settle in the Netzebruch? Who owned the land on which they settled?

During the seventy years that Mennonites lived in the area, the inhabitants of Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal exercised a greater role within the religious and political life of the Prussian Mennonite community, even within Prussian politics, than one would expect of two relatively small villages.

As previously mentioned, the early settlers of Brenkenhoffswalde “met in the homes of the members until the available rooms were too small. The government then gave them a building site for a church free of charge, and the funds for the building were donated by the Dutch Mennonites” (Hege 1957). So it was that on 8 November 1778 the Brenkenhoffswalde church met in its own building; Franztal followed suit nine years later, in 1787.

H. G. Mannhardt offers additional background about these Mennonites by identifying the group from which they derived (i.e., the Przechowka church):

They belonged to the “Groninger Mennonites,” or Groninger Old Flemish. This explains why they had not joined the larger Frisian congregation in the Culm lowlands at Schönsee, but had formed a congregation of their own with some scattered members at Thorn and Schwetz. They maintained contact and communion with these after they had come to Brenkenhoffswalde.

To be clear, the Przechowka church was not the only Mennonite church in the Schwetz/Culm area; there was another (Frisian) church in Schönsee, as well as other Mennonite churches at villages somewhat more distant.* Mannhardt’s point is that the Przechowka church was of the Groninger Old Flemish group, as were the Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal churches.

Thanks to the Dutch Naamlijst der tegenwoordig in dienst zijnde predikanten der Mennoniten in de Vereenigde Nederlanden (here), we know the names of some of the preachers of the congregation at Brenkenhoffswalde: “Andreas Voet (Foth), Ernst Voet (Foth), Peter Jansz, Jacob Schmidt, and Peter Isaack” (Mannhardt 1953). The Peter Jansz/Jantz listed is probably the Brenkenhoffswalde preacher who, in 1814, “spent twenty-four hours in jail for resisting registration” for military service (Jantzen 2010, 93).

The most famous Mennonite figure to be associated with Brenkenhoffswalde, however, was not even born into a Mennonite family. Once again, Mannhardt explains:

In 1788 the Lutheran teacher Wilhelm Lange of Brenkenhoffswalde, who had been appointed to the position by the government, asked permission of the authorities to transfer to the Mennonite faith, since he had grown up and been educated among Mennonites and was inwardly bound to them. On 24 October 1788 he received permission to do so, on condition that his obligations to the state and his duties as a citizen would not suffer. Wilhelm Lange became a respected and influential member; in 1802 he was chosen preacher, and in 1810 elder, which office he still held when the congregation emigrated to Russia in 1834.

In late eighteenth-century Prussia, one could not easily change from one faith or church to another, for example, from Lutheran to Catholic or Lutheran to Mennonite. Joining a Mennonite church was especially limited, to prevent military-age males from converting in order to avoid military service. Lange, having served as the state-appointed teacher in Brenkenhoffswalde, was permitted to join the Mennonite church, though not with the benefit of thereby avoiding military conscription. Mennonite churches in the Vistula Delta rejected such converts, but Brenkenhoffswalde clearly permitted them (see Jantzen 2010, 116).

Letter of Wilhelm Lange to Peter Wedel, 1815.

Lange soon rose to prominence within the local congregation, then among the West Prussian Mennonite churches at large. As elder (from 1810 until his death in 1841), Lange exercised considerable authority and influence both in his own church and in Mennonite churches across West Prussia (as evidenced, e.g., in his letter to Elder Peter Wedel of Przechowka; for additional letters, see the Bethel College Mennonite Library and Archives here).

It seems likely that Lange also influenced the practices of the Brenkenhoffswalde church in a significant way when the congregation encountered a new challenge in the early nineteenth century. At that time “many groups hostile to the government were formed, and in consequence all meetings of private groups were prohibited, including the Mennonites. The only exception made to this ruling concerned meetings held under the auspices of the Bohemian Brethren” (Hege 1957). The church “at once formed connections with the Brethren [aka Moravians] and continued to meet unmolested” (Hege 1957).

Jantzen explains the significance of this association:

The Brenkenhofswalde congregation drank deeply from the wells of Moravian and early nineteenth-century Awakened revivalist piety, due perhaps to Lange’s own background. From these circles they adopted the ritual of child dedication as well as an interest in missions and education, all of which they communicated to Mennonites in the Vistula area and in Russia. The fusion of some aspects of Protestant identity with Mennonite theology in this congregation went so deep that they referred to themselves in an 1830 petition to the king as a “defenseless, Protestant, baptism-minded, Mennonite clan.”

The association of the Mennonites and Moravians is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that “in 1810 Elder Wilhelm Lange of Brenkenhofswalde undertook a preaching tour of the churches there together with a Pastor Jahr of the Moravian Brethren, and was well received” (Janzten 2010, 128). Peter M. Friesen adds, “Scores of people from other faiths thronged to hear him speak. His preaching tours in West Prussia were well-received and very successful” (Friesen 1980, 99)

Friesen elaborates further on the spiritual life of the Brenkenhoffswalde church, although we must be aware of the possibility that Friesen is projecting onto earlier history his own biases in favor of the Mennonite Brethren movement, which to a large extent has its roots in the Brenkenhoffswalde and Gnadenfeld churches (an entirely separate story):

Aside from the two regular Sunday services and one week-night service, they conducted private services here and there in the homes under the supervision of the elder and the ministers. These were not preaching services, but open discussions in which everyone was free to speak; the persons directly in charge were chosen from the ranks of the brotherhood by the congregation and its council, and designated as discussion leaders. (Friesen 1980, 98)**

Clearly, the Brenkenhoffswalde congregation was on the forefront of developments within the West Prussian Mennonite community, with Wilhelm Lange often leading the way. Although one might have expected this backwater church to have had little impact upon its religious and political world, for much of its history it exerted significant influence, even down to the very end of its habitation in the Neumark, which will be the subject of the following post.

Notes

* Is it possible that our direct ancestors attended one of the other Mennonite churches in the Schwetz or Przechowka area? We should not assume that all Bullers without fail attended any single church. This is an intriguing thought that must await evidence of some kind.

** Friesen argues that these developments did not arise from Moravian or Neopietist influence but rather were returns to earlier Mennonite practice (i.e., practices first established by Menno Simons). Friesen cites as evidence “an article in the Mennonitische Rundschau from the pen of the aged Elder Isaak Peters, formerly school teacher in Fuerstenau and Sparrau, Molotschna, South Russia, then elder of the Pordenau Church, and now, since 1874, in Henderson, Nebraska, one of our most knowledgeable, if not the most knowledgeable student of Anabaptist literature” (Friesen 1980, 71–72, citing Mennonitische Rundschau volume 37, 1906).

If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it is because the Isaac Peters in question was Grandma Malinda’s great-grandfather, whom we first encountered here.

Works Cited

Friesen, Peter M. 1980. The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia (1789–1910). 2nd ed. Translated by J. B. Toews et al. Fresno, CA: Board of Christian Literature, General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.

Hege, Christian. 1957. Netzebruch (Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

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

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

Mennonites in Neumark 1a

Before we move on to the Brenkenhoffswalde church, we should take a moment to elaborate on a few points relevant to the first post.

1. Why the Mennonites were invited to Neumark

It is frequently written that the Mennonites were invited to Neumark (aka the Netzebruch) in order to drain the “boggy wetland along the lower course of the Netze/Noteć river” (Hege 1957), thus making the land suitable for agriculture. Christian Hege continues:

As early as 1738 Mennonite families from Poland had tried to make this land arable, but were interrupted by the first Silesian War. When oppression at the hands of a landlord in the region of Schwetz became more and more marked, three Mennonites from the village of Jeziorka on the Tuchel Heath made a successful personal appeal to Frederick the Great to have this region admitted into eastern Ostmark; they also received permission for 32 Mennonite families to settle in this desolate region, which they turned into fertile land for grain and meadow by industry and perseverance.

Jacob Mannhardt writes similarly that the Mennonites were settled as a result of “Frederick the Great [giving] Councilor Brenkenhoff charge of settling the marshy Netzebruch.” Adalbert Goertz provides more detail: “Franz von Brenkenhof (1723–1780) was appointed by the Prussian King Friedrich II to lead the effort of draining the Netze swamps and to gain arable land for Prussia. He especially advertised in Poland for settlers to the Neumark” (Goertz 2001, 47).

Peter M. Friesen adds to the account:

Their [the Mennonite settlers’] delegates, who had sought an audience with the king [Frederick II], had been coincidentally recognized as “Dutchmen” because of their speech and clothing by the Lord of Brenkenhofswalde, who accosted them, presented them to the king, who in turn granted them extraordinary privileges. They were expected to drain the marshy land, a task they accomplished brilliantly in short order. … Thus, even in the midst of this militaristic Prussia, the non-combatant Mennonites were welcomed as victorious warriors against swamps, fever and poverty, at least until swamp and fever had been replaced by cultivated fields and prosperity. (Friesen 1980, 97–98)

The story is embellished further by Horst Gerlach:

Three Mennonite families who had lived under oppressive Polish noblemen in Jesiorka and 35 other families who had lived under the jurisdiction of Anton von Wipschinsky near Danzig came to the Netzebruch, a swampy area near Driesen and founded the colonies Brenkenhoffswalde, Franzthal, and Neu-Dessau. In the “Kiewitzwinkel” and a section of pasture belonging to the village of Trebitsch, which had not been used for ages, they brought the land, after draining it, into an arable condition. Here they could settle fourteen families, each having lots of 10–15 hectares (25–37 acres). They drained the Carleische Hütung and the “Elsenbruch.”

So what is the truth of the matter? The number of errors in the Gerlach description (the thirty-five families did not live near Danzig, and the village of Trebitsch was hundreds of miles south) permits us to ignore it. Likewise, the triumphalistic tone of the Friesen account (“victorious warriors against swamps, fever and poverty”) should probably give us pause. This leaves us with a more minimalistic conclusion: the Prussian king Frederick II commissioned Franz von Brenkenhoff to enlist a variety of new settlers who would turn the water-saturated area along the Nezte River into productive farmland; some of those settlers were Mennonites from the Jeziorka (and Schwetz) area.

That these Mennonite families were expected to turn marshy wetlands into arable farmland seems indisputable, but we should probably not read too much into a presumed association between these “Dutch” Mennonites and special skill in draining low-lying river land. Granted, the Mennonites of the Vistula Delta did show special skill in draining swamps and maintaining dikes (here). Still, we must not forget who these Mennonite families were: former residents of Jeziorka, which was miles from the Vistula River on higher ground; most had never had to battle boggy wetlands or flooding rivers. In all likelihood, what they brought to the task was not special skill in draining swamps but rather the “industry and perseverance” that was necessary for the job.

2. Who owned the land?

Peter M Friesen writes in his account that the Neumark Mennonites settled on “the estates of a royal counsellor, Franz von Brenkenhofswalde, located near the city of Driesen and the Netz river” (Friesen 1980, 97). This is why he can speak of the “Lord of Brenkenhofswalde” in the earlier quote above.

Apart from the anachronism of referring to a Lord of Brenkenhofswalde before the village was founded (the Mennonites established it in 1765; there was no Brenkenhofswalde prior to that), the information that Adalbert Goertz has assembled indicates that the land belonged to the king, not to Franz Balthasar Schönberg von Brenkenhoff.

Goertz writes:

Prior to 1812, there were three land sovereigns [i.e., owners of land] in Prussia:

1) The king (crownland)
2) The nobility (Rittergüter)
3) The cities (Kammergüter)

Praestations-Tabellen (PT) are land tax lists since about 1774 and were updated about every six years until 1806 and continued from 1819 to about 1850. They list land tenants on royal domain lands (crownland) only, giving tenant names, land size in H(ufen), M(orgen) and R(uten) and tax assesssed it Reichthaler, Groschen, and Pfennig. No PTs ever existed for Rittergüter or for Kammergüter on city territories.
The Kgl. (Royal) Domainen-Amt or Domainen-Rent-Amt administered and levied the tax (= Praestation) on crownland. The Domainen-Amt districts were usually identical with the court districts (Justiz-Amt, later called Amts-Gericht). These courts were established in 1783. For the Mennonites in the Neumark the Amt and court (Justiz-Amt) was located at Driesen. (Goertz 2001, 47)

All the Praestations-Tabellen (land tax lists) that we surveyed earlier—for 1767, 1793, 1805, 1806, and 1826 for the villages of Neu Dessau, Brenkenhoffswalde, and Franztal—would not exist if the land had been owned by the noble Franz von Brenkenhoff. That they do exist is testimony to the fact that the land was owned by the king of Prussia; the Neumark Mennonites leased their land directly from the king.

Works Cited

Friesen, Peter M. 1980. The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia (1789–1910). 2nd ed. Translated by J. B. Toews et al. Fresno, CA: Board of Christian Literature, General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.

Gerlach, Horst. 1989. Water Technology. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Goertz, Adalbert. 2001. Mennonites in Amt Driesen of the Neumark, Brandenburg, Prussia. Mennonite Family History 20:47–51.

Hege, Christian. 1957. Netzebruch (Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

***

Additional resources if they can ever be located (Heimatkalender für den Kreis Friedeberg):

Rudolf März-Vorbruch. 1929. Neues von den Mennoniten im Netzebruch. Heimatkalender, Friedeberg, 19–26.

1929. Franz Balthasar Schönberg von Brenkenhoff. Heimatkalender, Friedeberg, 39–43.

See further here.

Mennonites in Neumark 1

From time to time we have mentioned in passing the circumstances that led to the establishment of Mennonite villages 120 miles west of the Mennonite communities along the Vistula River, but we have not previously recounted in full the broader historical contexts and key events. To fill this gap, the present post will begin to tell the story of why Mennonite (and Buller) families left the Schwetz area to live in the Neumark region and then later left Neumark behind in search of a better life in new locales.

The story begins in Jeziorka (A), the Mennonite village just to the west of Schwetz and the Przechowka church (C). In 1727 Mennonites began leasing land around Jeziorka from a Polish noble, but in the early 1760s one of the noble’s descendants tried to change the terms of the lease. Rather than accept the new lease terms, the Jeziorka Mennonites began searching for someplace better to work and live, someplace more accommodating to the commitments of their faith.

According to Peter Klassen:

In 1764, delegates from Jeziorka went to Berlin to explore settlement possibilities. Such a move would mean leaving Polish jurisdiction and moving to lands ruled by Frederick II [king/emperor of Prussia]. One of the king’s officials, Franz Balthasar Schonberg von Brenkenhoff, was charged with bringing new settlers to the Netze (Noteć) River region, near Driesen in Brandenburg.… When he invited Mennonites to settle there, they accepted. (Klassen 2009, 86)

These Mennonites were granted certain rights by Frederick II’s privilegium of 7 February 1765: “free exercise of their religion, recognition of their word in place of the oath, [and] freedom from military service for themselves and their posterity” (Hege 1957).

Later on, the settlers were given permission to erect their own schools and church buildings. As we noted with the initial Mennonite community in Volhynia (here), the new settlers were allowed to use wood from crown land to construct their homes. According to some, each family also received “at least 40 ‘Magdeburg Morgen’ [perhaps circa 25 acres] of land” (Hege 1957), although, as we noted earlier, some families appear not to have had any land at all.

Franz Balthasar Schönberg von Brenkenhoff

The thirty-five families who arrived in the Neumark area established at least two villages: Franztal and Brenkenhoffswalde, both appropriately named after the emperor’s official who had brought them to their new home: Franz Balthasar Schonberg von Brenkenhoff. Mennonites also lived in a third village, Neu Dessau, but a majority of the residents there were Lutheran, so Neu Dessau cannot be considered a Mennonite village in the strict sense.

The families did not own their own land but rather leased and lived on crown land, on land belonging to the Prussian king. The leases to the land generally extended over a lengthy period of time, often decades, which transformed the leases into a valuable property of sorts: the right to lease a particular piece of land owned by the crown could be bought and sold and passed down from generation to generation. We saw earlier that David Buller 346 sold his rights to a plot in Neu Dessau for 570 Reichsthalers (here). This arrangement created a certain stability for all concerned without the king needing to give up ownership of his property.

At the outset, life in the Netzebruch was hard but rewarding. One report concluded that “the Mennonites proved themselves most industrious and most useful” (Hege 1957). Of course, church life formed a central part of the community’s existence. Peter Klassen explains that the Mennonite settlers “at first held church services in homes, but in 1778 they dedicated a newly constructed church building in Brenkenhoffswalde. Nine years later, another church was built in Franztal, with financial help from Holland and Hamburg” (Klassen 2009, 87). Clearly, these new Mennonite communities were not orphans in the wilderness but rather full members of the broader Mennonite family who received support as needed and presumably contributed support as they were able.

Over time, Brenkenhoffswalde became best known among the Mennonite community, and even the Prussian empire, for several of the leaders of its church. But that really is another story, and it will be the focus of the next post in this short series on Mennonites in Neumark from beginning to end.

Works Cited

Hege, Christian. 1957. Netzebruch (Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Klassen, Peter J. 2009. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Where did they go?

This is not so much a post as a question that needs to be asked out loud: Where did the Neumark Bullers go?

We know that Andreas Andreas (i.e., Jr.) Buller went to Volhynia (here) and that Heinrich the elder and his offspring (apparently) Heinrich the younger emigrated to Gnadenfeld in Molotschna colony (here), but what happened to the other Bullers?

Some may have passed away while still living in the Neumark region, for example, David 346 or his brother Andreas 345 (= Andreas Sr.), but we do not know that for certain. Maybe they left the area and lived out their days in some other location.

Further, since Heinrich the elder was still alive in 1835, we might expect the same as his brother Peter Jr. (both of them sons of Peter 351, or Sr.). Where might Peter Jr. have gone?

Likewise, at present we are uncertain what happened to the descendants of George 350 (brother of Peter 351). George’s son Heinrich also had a son named Heinrich who probably emigrated to some other locale between 1806 and 1826. If so, which one? Likewise, what of Maria and Anna, Heinrich Jr.’s sister or possibly aunts? When did they leave Neumark, and where did they go?

Finally, we also wonder the “stray” Bullers whose ancestry is yet unknown: Johann, Heinrich of plot 3 in Franztal, and landless George in 1805 Franztal. Will they turn up in the records for some other place?

The various forms of this central question will guide our exploration for a little while to come, as we continue to connect the dots of the historical records at our disposal.

Neumark recap

We are not yet ready to move on from Neumark; in addition to learning more about the establishment of the Mennonite villages and the conditions that led them to be abaandoned for life in Molotschna colony, we need to recap and reorganize somewhat, so that we remember both the Bullers whom we encountered and understand the relationships between them.

Presenting a recap, a reconstruction such as this is tricky business, so let it be said directly up front: a good portion of what follows is a reasonable explanation of the evidence that we have, but little of it is rock-solid fact. I believe the reconstruction is accurate, but I admit that it may be mistaken in some details. Caveat lector! Let the reader beware!

1. The evidence

We drew principally upon two sources during this investigation: the Przechowka church book and Prussian governmental Praestations-Tabellen (land tax lists) and other records.

2. The locales

We begin with the Przechowka church, located near the Polish city of Schwetz (Świecie), a mile west of the Vistula River (at the right end of the red line). Many Mennonites from the immediate area were members of that church, including residents (Bullers) from the small village of Jeziorka roughly ten miles to the west-northwest of Schwetz (here, here, and here).

In 1765, thirty-five families from this area (twenty-eight from Jeziorka and seven from Schönsee and Przechowka) emigrated approximately 120 miles west-southwest to the Netzebruch, a boggy wetland around the Netze/Noteć River (the area at the left end of the line; see Klassen 2009, 87; Hege 1957). There these Mennonite families established three villages: Brenkenhoffswalde, Franztal, and Neu Dessau.

3. The original Buller immigrants

The available evidence implies that at least three Buller families made the journey from Schwetz to Neumark: Hans 341 and family (generation 3), George 350 and family (generation 4), and Peter 351 and family (generation 4). All three were part of the Jeziorka component of the group.

The 1767 tax list informs us that Peter 351, his wife, and their two sons and two daughters settled in Brenkenhoffswalde (here). The same list reports that George 350, his wife, and their daughter and son took up residence in Franztal (here). One wonders if their father George 342 also moved to Neumark, but that question must remain open, due to a lack of evidence.

The evidence for Hans 341’s family is not quite as straightforward, but by coordinating information in the Przechowka church book with Prussian tax lists, we were able to argue convincingly that Hans 341 and four of his six children were likely among the original immigrants (here). Hans himself does not appear in any of the tax lists, but two of his sons do later on, which lends credence to the idea that Hans and his nonadult children moved to Neumark with the rest of the Mennonites in 1765.

4. Peter 351 and family (Brenkenhoffswalde)

As already observed, Peter 351 appears as a resident of Brenkenhoffswalde in the 1767 tax list along with his wife, two daughters, and two sons. In all likelihood, the two sons were named Peter Jr. and Heinrich, both of whom are listed as lease holders in the 1793, 1805, and 1806 tax lists. Peter 351 (Sr.) disappears after the 1793 list, probably indicating that he died between 1793 and 1805.

Both sons appear on the 1806 tax list but not twenty years later, on the 1826 list. However, Heinrich makes a final appearance on the emigration list of 1835, apparently as the sixty-nine-year-old father of one-year-old Heinrich Buller, the illegitimate son of Helena Voth. It seems that Heinrich the elder gave up his lease sometime before the 1826 tax list but remained in Brenkenhoffswalde as a renter to the very end of Mennonite habitation of the village. Both Heinrich the elder and his presumed son Heinrich the younger apparently ended up in Gnadenfeld, a village in Molotschna.

5. George 350 and family (Franztal)

The 1767 tax list reports that George 350, his wife, and their son and daughter resided in Franztal. Clearly, they were part of the 1765 immigrant group. The 1793 tax list does not list George, which likely signals that he had died in the interim. Another Buller, Heinrich, was lease holder of the same plot that George had previously held, which almost certainly signals that this Heinrich was George’s son.

Twelve years later, the 1805 lists Heinrich’s widow and, apparently, two daughters (or sisters?) named Maria and Anna, indicating that Heinrich was no longer alive. A year later, however, the lease had been taken over by Heinrich Jr., no doubt the son of Heinrich Sr. The male family line, thus, was George 350 > Heinrich Sr. > Heinrich Jr. By 1826, none of the family leased land in Franztal; the only Buller who remained was the widow of a man named Voth. Nine years later, in 1835, a Benjamin Voth widow nee Buller by the name of Maria is listed as a thirty-four-year old living in Franztal. It is tempting to identify this woman first with the 1805 Maria and then with the 1826 widow Voth, but that might be making more than we should out of a coincidence of names.

6. Hans 341 and family (Neu Dessau and Franztal)

According to the Przechowka church book, Hans and his wife had six children: three daughters and three sons. It is likely that Hans and wife and four of their children moved from Jeziorka to Neumark in 1765. Their daughter Ancke (344), who married at age fifteen in 1760, remained behind, as did Heinrich 348, who later married a widowed and then divorced woman from the Przechowka area.

We cannot say with certainty that daughters Maricke 347 and Trincke 349 moved to Neumark, but the lack of information about them in the Przechowka church book points in that direction. The two sons clearly moved to the Neumark area, which supports our hypothesis that the entire family left Jeziorka and made the journey to Neumark in 1765.

David 346 turns up only in relation to Neu Dessau in the Prussian records (here and here). David is not listed as a property holder in 1771, which would be consistent with the hypothesis that only the nonadult children of Hans 341 moved with him to Neumark (i.e., David was presumably not yet an adult in 1771). However, later records mention David twice, when he sold his rights to 37 acres of Neu Dessau property in 1779 and when he was listed, along with daughters Anna and Sara, among the creditors of Johann Dirks, possibly a relative of David’s wife, Trincke Dirks Buller.

Like his brother David 346, Andreas 345 can be linked with relative confidence to Neumark (here). Andreas 345 appears in the 1793, 1805, and 1806 tax lists but not in 1767 (when he was likely too young to lease property) or 1826 (when he had passed away or left the area). An Andreas Jr. appears in 1806 and 1806; the fact that he took over the property formerly leased by Andreas 345 is a clear indication that these were father (Andreas 345, or Sr.) and son (Jr.).

Like his father, Andreas Jr. is absent from the 1826 tax list. Remarkably, we know where he went: to Antonovka in Volhynia (here). From the Volhynian records we also know that Andreas Jr.’s wife was named Anna and that they had a daughter Maria and sons named David and Benjamin, all of whom had been born in Franztal.

7. Stray Bullers

The Neumark records also name individuals whom we cannot place; they are listed here for the sake of completeness—and with the hope that someday we will be able to identify them.

Johann Buller is listed as a Brenkenshoffswalde lease holder in 1805 but not in 1806.

A Heinrich Buller who is not Heinrich Sr. or Jr. discussed above leased plot 3 in Franztal from at least 1793 through 1806.

A George Buller is listed as a resident of Franztal in 1805, but he is not said to have held a lease for any land.

Marie Schmitt Buller Baecker had been married to a Buller at some point; in 1835, she was a sixty-five-year old resident of Franztal.

Helene Buller Unruh was the twenty-four-year-old wife of Georg Unruh of Brenkenhoffswalde in 1835.

8. Conclusion

The emigration from Jeziorka to Neumark in 1765 certainly was a family matter. This is probably why the three Buller families who emigrated at that time account for most of the Bullers we find in the Neumark historical records. The pieces, whether derived from the Przechowka church book or Prussian governmental records, seem to fit together well. Three Bullers—generation 3’s Hans 341 and generation 4’s George 350 and Peter 351—led their families 120 miles west in search of new land and new opportunity. The Buller family remained there in some form for seventy years, but eventually all the Bullers and other Mennonites of the area picked up their stakes and moved once again. Why they did so will be the subject for a future post.

Works Cited

Hege, Christian. 1957. Netzebruch (Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Klassen, Peter J. 2009. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.