The book titles this list “Auszüge aus dem alten Familienbuch der Mennonitengemeinde Deutsch-Wymyschle, Polen,” that is, “Excerpts from the Old Family Book of the Mennonite Congregation of Deutsch-Wymysle, Poland.” Why is the title important? It tells readers what to expect—and what not to expect. List 3 is not the complete list of Mennonites associated with the church; rather, list 3 offers excerpts from, or parts of, the list of Deutsch-Wymysle congregants.
A second word in the title also deserves special mention: Familienbuch. As we will see shortly, list 3 is organized not by person but by family; it records nuclear families, thus revealing who was related to whom. Even further, the list is organized by family groups: all the Bullers are together, right after the Bartels and immediately before the Foths. The list of Bullers covers most of three pages, which makes it easy to see both the big picture and the growth of a particular line over time.
Although the posts will include snippets of the pages under discussion, readers can see the original pages for themselves at the following links:
Notice also that clicking on the page zooms in for a real closeup. Go ahead, take some time simply to look around.
A few final comments before we examine several Bullers more closely. It is interesting to note that the list skips a few numbers (278, 279, 622) but also uses the same base number (126) plus the letters a, b, c, d, e, f, and g for an entire family. This means that one cannot equate the last number (941) with the number of people listed. It appears that there are 945 people listed; it is probably safest to say that the records list nearly 950 people.
The time span of the listings is not stated (anywhere that I can find), but it seems that the earliest date of birth is 1780, that of Rosine Kraft Unruh (783). The latest date of birth appears to be 1920, for the birth of Leonhard Schröder (642). The latest date of death recorded is Julianna Schmidt in 1965 (!), which seems odd, given that this copy of the church records was made in 1949. It will be interesting to see if there are other late dates like this one. At any rate, since the earliest-born person on the list (Rosine Kraft Unruh) did not come to Deutsch-Wymysle until around 1810 (based on the places of birth for the Unruh children), we can reasonably assume that this list contains many, probably even most, of the members of the church between 1810 and the early decades of the 1900s.
With those “few” words of background, we are ready to investigate the first Buller family listed (on page 29, linked above).
The columns are fairly straightforward; since we will see them on all the pages, it will be worthwhile to identify them now. The two columns on the left have the heading “Siehe,” which in context means “See” or “Refer.” The column on the left is “Seite” (page); the one on the right is the abbreviation “Nr.” (number). Thus, the two columns indicate that Heinrich Buller is also listed as number 20 on page 9 (see here).
The next two columns to the right provide the ”Familie” number (each family has its own number) and then what is clearly the consecutive numbering of the individuals, although the cryptic “Lfol.” abbreviation is unclear (unless it is a combination of Liste and Folge, thus list sequence or something similar).
After the Name column we have the “Geburtsdatum” (date of birth) and the “Geburts- und Wohnart” (place of birth and residence). The last two columns share the word -“zeit”: the first is the “Trauzeit” (wedding date); the second is the “Sterbezeit” (death date).
So, for example, from the Heinrich Buller line we know that he is also listed as number 20 on page 9, that he is the head of Deutsch-Wymysle family 14, and that he is number 97 in list 3; he was born 4 December 1787 in Brenkenhoffswalde (Neumark) and married Helene Unruh on 20 January 1815. He died at the age of sixty-seven on his fortieth anniversary, 20 January 1855.
A few additional observations will bring this post to a close.
1. Heinrich and Helene’s first child, Anna, was born in 1816 in Brenkenhoffswalde. Their next child, Andreas, was born three years later in Deutsch-Wymysle. Upon the basis of these two dates, we can narrow the window of when the Heinrich Buller family emigrated from the Neumark to Deutsch-Wymysle considerably: it was sometime between September 1816 and July 1819.
2. A date of death is known for only three of the seven family members: Heinrich, Andreas, and Johann. The latter two died at the ages of thirty-five and sixty-two. We will track the life spans of other Bullers and Mennonites from this list, to see what insight that might give us into the lives of these people.
3. Of the five children listed, the last two were born quite a bit after the first three, with a space of twenty-two years between the third and fourth. The fourth, Wilhelm, was born in Swiniary, and the fifth, Heinrich, was born back in Deutsch-Wymysle. The long gap between children is provided an explanation across the marriage column: “Anna ihr Sohn,” literally “Anna her son.” In other words, the records are clarifying that Wilhelm and Heinrich were the sons of daughter Anna, not the sons of Heinrich the elder and Helene. The fact that Wilhelm and Heinrich the younger have the last name Buller and no identifiable father leaves little doubt but that these two boys were born out of wedlock.
There is little more that can be gleaned from this family entry on its own, but the next few posts will take what we have here and place it in the larger context of what we know about both the Bullers and the Mennonites of that time frame.
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