GM 6a, Helena Zielke Buller, 11304

After a brief detour into matters of more general Mennonite interest, we are ready to return to the series that examines, corrects, and supplements the GRANDMA database entries on our immediate and more distant family. We last covered Grandpa Chris’s great-grandfather David Buller (here); we pick up with David Buller’s first wife, Helena Zielke.

The information given in GM can be expanded and corrected in a number of places.

Sources: Information relevant to Helena Zielke Buller appears in the following sources:

1. Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820


2. 1850 Census of Heinrichsdorf, Volhynia


3. Buller Family Record

Birth: The GM date of birth is presumably an estimate based on Helena’s husband David’s listed year of birth (which is itself off by a year, as demonstrated in his entry).

The best evidence for Helena’s date of birth is the Rovno register (link 1 above), which lists her age when the census was taken in 1820. (It is possible that the census was taken in 1819, but 1820 seems to me more likely). As can be seen in the last line of the register entry below, Helena was a year old at that time.

The same Rovno register lists her future husband David’s age as two, so it stands to reason that she was born a year after he was, thus probably in 1819.

However, the 1850 census of Heinrichsdorf (link 2, family 22) states that both Helena and David were thirty-one when that census was taken, so we cannot be certain that Helena was born one year after David; both may have been born in 1818. At the least, we can be fairly confident that the two were relatively close in age, with David up to a year older.

Whether Helena was born in 1818 or 1819, we can be certain that she was born in Volhynia, in the village of Zofyovka. Her family was among those who settled in that village in 1810, so there can be little doubt that Helena was born there. She was not, contra the Buller Family Record (link 3), born in Poland.

Death: GM’s date and place of death are reasonable estimates.

The GM date of death presumably is based on the information provided in the Buller Family Record, which lists 1855 followed by a question mark. One imagines that Helena’s date of associated with the birth of her last son, David, whose date of birth is given as 14 February 1855. The hypothesis would be that Helena died sometime shortly after his birth, perhaps even as a result of complications arising from that birth. None of this is known, of course; it is all hypothetical.

We might further specify the place of Helena’s death as Waldheim in Molotschna colony, which was, to be sure, south Russia. We cannot state this with certainty, but it seems most likely. We know that David, Helena, and children were in the village Heinrichsdorf in Volhynia in 1850 (link 2). We also know that, sometime before the 1858 compilation of the Heinrichsdorf church book, David, Helena, and family had left the village, since they do not appear in it.

The question then becomes: Did the family leave Heinrichsdorf before or after Helena’s death? As is generally the case, we can offer only a plausible explanation, not certainty. If Helena had died while the family was in Heinrichsdorf, one would have expected David to stay close to his family support system there, rather than to leave for Waldheim with six children in tow or even to remarry relatively quickly and then leave with his new wife and large brood to relocate hundreds of miles south. None of this can be known, of course, but it seems most likely, I think, that Helena died in Waldheim and was buried there.

*****

This seems a reasonable place to stop for the moment. Thus far we have corrected the GM date and place of birth and clarified the likely place of death. The next post will expand the GM information about Helena’s family significantly, which could or should lead to the addition of several entries to the GM database.