Searching for Benjamin’s Father 11

We will wrap up the Benjamin series shortly, but first it is worth our while to spend a moment examining the 1810 Mennonite Census of the Schwetz Region of West Prussia (here) referenced in the previous post. In that census we noticed a nineteen-year-old (thus born around 1791) Benjamin Buller who was a servant in the house of Elder Benjamin Wedel of Przechovka. Quite apart from the question of whether this Benjamin is our direct ancestor (see the following post), this information prompts one to wonder of how common it was for Mennonite young people to serve in the houses of nonrelative (we assume) Mennonites.

We have encountered the practice of servanthood previously, in Baron von Haxthausen’s account of his 1843 visit to the Molotschna colony (see here):

Nowhere is a more complete equality observable in all that relates to religious institutions than among the Mennonites. … This prevailing equality is most clearly manifested in the relation between master and servant; I noticed this particularly between Herr Kornies and the servant who drove us; it appeared more like the relation of a son to his father than of a servant to his master. On my remarking this to Herr Kornies, he replied, “With us it is a rule that every one, even the son of the richest peasant, should live as a servant for a few years with one of the neighbours; service therefore with us does not constitute the occupation of a class, but is one step in life, a school; one of my younger brothers was for some time a servant [429] with me, and he is now my superintendent. We pay our men-servants and girls very high wages—from thirty to seventy silver roubles—and keep this custom up strictly, which is found to bring us no loss. In this way even a poor man has an opportunity of accumulating a small fortune, and here, where there is plenty of fertile waste land, of establishing a small farm and becoming a peasant himself. It is by no means unusual for the daughters even of rich peasants to marry a servant of the house, however poor, provided he is worthy and industrious.” (von Haxthausen 1856, 1:428–29)

Based on von Haxthausen’s report, we might imagine that the Molotschna practice had a long history, having begun at least in Poland/West Prussia, if not earlier. Still, before we jump to any conclusions, we should examine the data of the census more closely. 

The 1810 census groups Mennonite families by village, which makes it easy to look for any patterns in the distribution of servants among these communities. The table below lists each village in the first column, then the number of families recorded for that village, followed by the number of servants listed for the entire village.

Bratwin	4	0
Przechovka	17	10
Beckersitz	4	1
Polnisch Westfahlen	3	0
Neunhuben	7	0
Deutsch Westpfalen	2	0
Dworzisko	1	0
Ostrower Kamp	8	1
Niedwitz	2	0
Glugowko	5	0

Clearly, Przechovka had the largest concentration of Mennonite families in the Schwetz area, but that is not what is most striking about the data. Ten out of the twelve servants listed in the census were found in Przechovka, ten servants within a group of seventeen families. All the other villages together had thirty-six families but only two servants.

Based on the information contained within the 1810 census, we could not conclude that servants in the families of all Mennonites was common; we could, however, reasonably say that this practice was more common among the Mennonite families of the Przechovka church—yet even that statement requires some clarification. Although the table above might be taken to imply that ten out of seventeen (or 59 percent) of the families in Przechovka had a servant in 1810, in fact, three families had two servants each and four had one. In terms of raw numbers, then, only 41 percent of the families had at least one servant, whereas 18 percent had two servants. These more nuanced figures may hint at the presence of social stratification in the church, although we would need far more evidence than this to consider this more than a suggestive possibility.

At the least, this should caution us against stating what Mennonites as a large group did or did not do. The various Mennonite congregations certainly shared many practices in common, but that does not mean that they were identical in terms of social or economic organization. Why Przechovka had a much higher incidence of nonrelative (again, we assume) servants than the other Mennonite villages in the Schwetz area is at present unknown, but it is an intriguing question that deserves further exploration.

It is not, of course, sufficient merely to look at the numbers of servants in each village. We should also ask about who these servants were. What can we learn about the practice by categorizing them by age and gender?

The gender question is easiest: the servants were equally divided between six females and six males. There was no clear preference for or expectation concerning one gender being more likely to assume a servant role.

The distribution of ages is more surprising, I think. First, the ages range from eighteen to thirty-two. This fact alone forces us to qualify the picture that von Haxthausen presents: servanthood was not only (perhaps) a rite of passage for young adults; apparently it was a way of life, a means of survival for those who for some reason lacked a family or a home of their own. A closer look as the age distribution of the servants reinforces the picture.

• Four servants are still in their teens: an eighteen-year-old and three nineteen-year-olds.
• Two male servants are twenty-one years old.
• Five of the servants are twenty-four, twenty-five, or twenty-six.
• The thirty-two-year old male servant is by far the oldest of the group.

The average age of all twelve servants is nearly twenty-three, which is older than one might expect. We should not draw any firm conclusions from this information, at least until we have a better sense of the average age at which Przechovka men and women entered their first marriages, but it seems that servanthood was not, for many of the individuals listed, the fulfillment of an expected role for a temporary period, a rite of passage incumbent upon all Mennonite young people; rather, becoming a servant in the home of a nonrelative was more likely an economic or social necessity, something that one did temporarily in order to improve one’s financial position or long-term in order to survive.

At the least, I think, we should not romanticize the notion of Mennonite young people serving in the homes and fields of their fellow congregants. Baron von Haxthausen’s report of Cornies’s defense of the institution presumably bears some seeds of truth, but I doubt that few young Mennonites aspired to be a servant in someone else’s home. The fact that so many in Przechovka did testifies both to the harshness of life in 1810 as well as their own determination to do whatever was necessary to make life better for themselves and, presumably, their families.

If Benjamin Buller, servant in the home of Benjamin Wedel, is our own ancestor, we may well have a better explanation than before why he left the Schwetz area for the unfamiliar territory of Volhynia. That explanation will be taken up in the following, and likely concluding, post.

Work Cited

Haxthausen, August von. 1856. The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions and Resources. Translated by Robert Farie. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall. Available online: vol. 1, vol. 2.