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.