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.