Searching for Benjamin’s Father 12

This series has attempted to answer a simple question, a question reflected in the title of the series itself: Who was Benjamin’s father? Having looked at all the evidence known to us at present that is relevant to one or another aspects of that question, we are ready to restate our questions, summarize our information, and draw whatever conclusions the evidence will bear. We begin by rehearsing the necessary background and then stating the basic question of this series.

Background and Question

1. As we have long known, David Buller was the father of Peter D, the father of Peter P, the father of Grandpa Chris. What we discovered some time back, thanks to Molotschna colony records made available online, was the name of David’s father: Benjamin (see the evidence collected here). Based on his age in the Rovno census, we estimated that Benjamin father of David was born sometime around 1789.

2. We also discovered from the same Molotschna records that Benjamin’s father was likewise named Benjamin (see the discussion of this Benjamin here). Based on the age of his children, we guessed (and I do mean guessed!) his year of birth to have been around 1765, give or take five or more years.

3. To distinguish these two Benjamins, we labeled the father Benjamin 1 and the son Benjamin 2. We thus were able to reconstruct our family line as follows (moving backward in time):

Grandpa Chris < Peter P < Peter D < David < Benjamin 2 < Benjamin 1 < ???? 

This reconstructed line also represents clearly the question with which this series has been concerned: Who was Benjamin 1’s father? 

Our uncertainty in this matter stems from a simple observation. The church book of the Przechovka congregation, the church from which all Bullers in our family seem to have come, lists no father–son combination in which both are named Benjamin during this time. Even worse, the Przechovka church book lists no Benjamin Buller born around 1789, the approximate year of Benjamin 2’s birth. This raised the question whether either Benjamin 1 or Benjamin 2 were a part of that church. We assumed that they were, but we lacked any documentary evidence proving so.

This was the situation before Glenn Penner offered a possible answer based on his understanding of the evidence that we do have, which includes both the church book and various government records. I have included Glenn’s suggestion in full at the end of this post, but we will summarize it around the two major subjects of our inquiry, our two Benjamins.

Benjamin 2

The central question concerning Benjamin 2 is whether he was a member of the Przechovka church. Thanks to the 1810 census of Mennonites in the Schwetz region of West Prussia (here), we have good reason to conclude that he was. The argument is rather straightforward.

1. The 1810 census lists a nineteen-year-old named Benjamin Buller.

2. This Benjamin Buller would thus have been born 1791 or thereabouts.

3. We know of no Benjamin Buller born around this time other than our ancestor.

These first three points establish beyond reasonable doubt that this Benjamin Buller is our ancestor.  The estimated dates of birth (1789 or 1791) are close enough to be considered a match, especially since there are no other Benjamin Bullers known to us. The next three points add further details about Benjamin.

4. This Benjamin Buller (2) was a servant of Benjamin Wedel of Przechovka.

5. We know that this same Benjamin Wedel was elder in the Przechovka church.

6. Thus, Benjamin Buller 2 was almost certainly also a member of that church 

It is true that we do not have documentary proof that Benjamin 2 was a member of the church; his name does not appear in the church book. However, his close association with the elder of the church makes it highly probable that Benjamin 2 was likewise a member of the church. 

We do not know exactly why Benjamin 2 is missing from the church book, but his absence does not really surprise, since it is the nature of church books of that era to have gaps and omissions. What we do know, or at least think we know with a fair degree of certainty, is that Benjamin 2 was born into the Przechovka church. Why is this important? Because it tells us that Benjamin 2’s father, Benjamin 1, was also a member of the Przechovka church, which gives us hope of identifying him in the church records.

Benjamin 1

According to the Przechovka church book, there was only one person named Benjamin Buller who could have fathered a son named Benjamin in the 1789–1791 period. This Benjamin, number 352 in the book, was almost certainly Benjamin 1, since there is no other Benjamin Buller listed who might have fathered Benjamin 2. As Glenn observed earlier, “ I cannot think of any other possibility without inventing more Benjamin Bullers (and I have no documentation available that would justify that).” To recap briefly: because we know that Benjamin 2 was born into the Przechovka church, and because we know of no Benjamin Buller in the church who could have fathered Benjamin 2 around 1790 other than number 352 Benjamin Buller in the church book, the only reasonable explanation is that number 352 is, in fact, Benjamin 1, father of Benjamin 2. Przechovka number 352 is almost certainly our ancestor, the person we have thus far referred to as Benjamin 1.

The church book tells us that Benjamin 1 was baptized 31 August 1772, which implies a year of birth around 1753–1755. Beyond that we cannot say, since the church book does not record a year or date of birth. Fortunately, the church book does tell us who Benjamin 1’s father was: Heinrich Buller, who was himself the son of Hans Buller, who was the son of George Buller and Dina Thoms—the founding Bullers of the Przechovka church.

This bears repeating: locating Benjamin 2 at the Przechovka church enables us to identify his father Benjamin 1, whose father Heinrich links us to the original Buller couple in the church. Our previous suspicions were correct: our family does come from the Przechovka church. Now that we know the identity of Benjamin 1, we also know the name of his father and our connection back to George and Dina, who are the earliest known Bullers of the Przechovka church.

We do know more about Benjamin 1 (see numbers 3–9 in this series), but the crucial point is that we now know the name of his father and his place in the line of Bullers descended from George Buller and Dina Thoms. This series is completed, but a new post awaits, one in which we update the chart of Bullers from the Przechovka church, a chart that will represent our unbroken family line for a period of over three centuries.

***

Glenn Penner prompted this investigation and this series with the following comments:

Some speculation about the Benjamin Bullers:

I believe that your ancestor Benjamin Buller (GRANDMA 402138) was the son of Benjamin who was both 60393 and 32139. I believe that not long after Benjamin 2 moved to Volhynia, his father Benjamin 1 (who would have been a widower of about 70 or more years) left for South Russia with his daughter Catharina and her husband Johann Ratzlaff (and the majority of the Przechowka congregation). Considering the rarity of the name Benjamin among the early Bullers I cannot think of any other possibility without inventing more Benjamin Bullers (and I have no documentation available that would justify that).

I also believe that Benjamin 1 was the Benjamin Buller found in Deutsch Konopath in the 1789 census of Mennonite land owners in West Prussia. Note that 32139 was married in Deutsch Konopath in 1774.

The only inconsistency here is that 60393 is given the patronymic Benjamin in the 1835 census and 32139 is known to be the son of Heinrich Buller. This ties in with some work I have been doing on the 1835 census. I have found that many of the men who died between the 1816 and 1835 censuses were given the same patronymic as their first names in the 1835 census and that some of these are incorrect. This is particularly true for those men who were older when they died (their fathers would have died in Prussia and their children never knew these grandfathers). This would be the case for Benjamin 1. It is likely that none of his survivors in Alexanderwohl knew the name of Benjamin 1’s father. It seems to me that whenever this was the case for the 1835 census the census taker simply repeated the deceased man’s name as the middle name patronymic.

I also believe that Benjamin 2 was the 19-year-old Benjamin Buller found in Przechowko in 1810 (http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/prussia/Schwetz_1810.htm). Again I see no other possibility. Your interpretation (as well as mine) of the Volhynian census has him coming from Prussia in 1817. If that is the case his marriage would have taken place in Prussia. The Mennonites of this region lived in the Schwetz Evangelical Lutheran parish. Since the state (Evangelical Lutheran) church was required to record the vital statistics of the Mennonites in their parishes from 1800 on, the Schwetz Lutheran church records should contain the marriage of Benjamin 2 and Helena (ca. 1813–15) and probably the birth of Benjamin 3 (ca. 1816). I cannot find any Mennonite entries in the Schwetz records which are available on microfilm. I noticed also that Adalbert Goertz extracted many Mennonite events from the Culm and Graudenz Lutheran records but not the Schwetz records. I see two possibilities of why there are no Mennonites in the Schwetz records: (1) all of the Lutheran ministers from 1800 until 1874 (when Mennonites were finally granted citizenship) did not record Mennonites, in violation of the law of 1800; or (2) they kept a separate register of Mennonite vital records (as was often done) and that/those register/s is/are missing.