Searching for Benjamin’s Father 6

Before going further down the Benjamin line, we pause briefly to add some depth to our portrait of Benjamin himself. We can, using the 1789 census of land-owning Mennonites, gain some sense of where Benjamin ranked within his immediate community. Our approach will be simple: we will order the Mennonite landowners in Benjamin’s village by amount of land owned as a means of comparing Benjamin’s land holdings with those closest to him.

Of course, we should note a few caveats. First, only Mennonites who owned land are listed; this is not a ranking of members of the total Mennonite community, since other Mennonites no doubt earned a living through means other than farming. Second, the census lists only Mennonites who owned land, not Lutheran or Catholic residents of Benjamin’s village who likewise owned land. Third, the farmers listed below may have owned some land and rented other land, so we cannot regard the ordering as the final word on how much land any individual listed actually farmed. The ordering is simply a relative ranking of likely wealth as measured in terms of land ownership.

With all those caveats in mind, we are ready to present the ordered list of Mennonite landowners in the village Deutsch Konopath (both greater and lesser) of the district Schwetz. The map below shows that Deutsch Konopath was located just west of Wintersdorf, that is, Przechovka. In all likelihood, then, the Mennonites listed along with Benjmanin were fellow members of the Przechovka church. (It might be interesting to see how many can be identified in the church book.)

The Mennonites listed are numbered in the census, but the significance of the numbers is not obvious and is probably merely a record-keeping device. The key data in the list are the totals of land owned, in Hufen, Morgen, and Ruten listed in the three columns. According to Adalbert Goertz (here), who transcribed this census, these measures of areas correspond to our own system as follows:

• 1 Hufen = ca. 41 acres
• 1 Hufen = 30 Morgen, so 1 Morgen = ca. 1.4 acres
• 1 Morgen = 300 Ruten (square rods)

The following table ranks the Mennonite landowners from Deutsch Konopath in order from greatest to least amount of land owned. The first column provides the person’s number from the list, followed by the name of the landowner, then number of Hufen, Morgen, and Ruten owned in three columns; the last column is the equivalent of the land owned in acres (rounded).

3	Ratzlaw, Johan	2	0	0	82
4	Tessmann, Jacob	1	14	0	61
1	Wedel, Cornelius	1	8	0	52
2	Tessmann, Peter	1	4	0	47
8	Panckau, Andr.	1	0	0	41
9	Schmidt, Jacob	0	26	0	36
5	Ratzlaw, Tobias	0	25	0	35
10	Becker, Johann	0	20	0	28
7	Schmidt, Peter	0	19	0	27
6	Buller, Peter	0	12	0	17
15	Ratzlaw, Adam	0	8	0	11
11	Pankratz, Jacob	0	6	0	8
12	Funck, Peter	0	6	0	8
13	Buller, Benjamin	0	3	0	4
14	Buller, Peter	0	2	150	2

Clearly, Benjamin was not one of the wealthiest Mennonite landowners in Deutsch Konopath; in fact, quite the opposite. A quick comparison with the other listings for the Schwetz district only reinforces the picture revealed in the table above. Most Mennonite landowners in the area had far more land than Benjamin; only a few owned as little as he did, although the two other Bullers of Deutsch Konopath were in the bottom six out of fifteen as well. 

There are no great revelations here, but we do gain some insight into Benjamin Buller’s situation. He was a farmer, to be sure, but he apparently survived by renting most of the land from which he eked out a living. By 1789 he had seven children, all of them living at home. Life was likely difficult and the future uncertain, and Benjamin and his family (our family?) survived and made it all the way to Molotschna.