Alexanderwohl 14

Finally we arrive at the single direct ancestor of our family line (or so we believe; see the series Searching for Benjamin’s Father in December 2017 and January 2018) who lived in Alexanderwohl: Benjamin Heinrich Buller. To recap briefly (see the chart here), our family line can be traced back to George Buller and Dina Thoms as follows:

George + Dina > Hans > Heinrich > Benjamin Heinrich > Benjamin Benjamin > David > Peter D > Peter P > Grandpa Chris

The name highlighted in red, Benjamin Heinrich, is the primary focus of this post.

As mentioned in the last Alexanderwohl post, the Mennonite Heritage Centre has created an English translation of the 1835 Molotschna census that we can consult. To be clear, this is not the original census, only a translation of it. Nevertheless, the translation is laid out like the original, so it is worthwhile to look at a scan of a page in the English translation.

Wirtschaft 16

The page below is the one that displays the entry for the plot where Benjamin Heinrich Buller lived.

As we have seen before, family members are listed on facing pages, males on the left and females on the right. Notice also that each family is associated with a particular Wirtschaft; this page contains the information for Wirtschaften 16, 17, and 18. For ease of reference, we will enlarge the information for Wirtschaft 16, beginning with the male side.

Each page is numbered, and the date of the census is entered for each village. Beyond that, the census includes valuable information. The column labeled Mennonite includes not only the names of all the males who lived at Alexanderwohl 16 but also the important note that the first one (Benjamin) settled in the year 1820. We suspected that from the emigration records examined in the Searching for Benjamin’s Father series, but this confirms it.

The column following records the person’s status at the time of the last census. Neither Benjamin nor any of the other residents were in Molotschna at that time (1816), so the census notes that they arrived after that census. Most important is the following column, which reports the date of departure from the previous location. In this case the “departure” is Benjamin’s death, which is recorded as taking place in 1830. Because Benjamin was deceased, no age was recorded for him.

Two final matters are worth noting with regard to Benjamin. First, his name is recorded as Benjamin Benjamin, not Benjamin Heinrich. Why is this? As Glenn Penner explains (see here), it seems that the 1835 census often repeats a deceased man’s first name as his middle name, presumably because whoever was supplying the census information did not know the deceased’s actual middle name. This may strike us as odd, but we should bear in mind the effects of time and distance: the people supplying the information in 1835 were separated by nearly 900 miles and several decades from their former lives, and they may not have remembered or ever known the name of their father’s father; in such cases, the census clerk apparently repeated a person’s first name as his middle one. Thus, although this person is listed as Benjamin Benjamin, we can safely conclude that he was actually Benjamin Heinrich.

Second, it is interesting to observe that Benjamin is listed first for Alexanderwohl 16, as though he was the head of the household. Was he? Earlier (here) we suggested that Benjamin’s son-in-law Johann Peter Ratzlaff was the head of the household. Our evidence was the Russian settlement record that states that Ratzlaff received “financial aid for the purchase of 1 horse at a sum of 50 rubles, and also for building a house and establishing the household, at a sum of 589 rubles” (Rempel 2007, 176). 

Does the listing of Benjamin first call our earlier supposition into question? Probably not. The fact that Ratzlaff was given the government loan to establish a household would seem to tip the balance in favor of him being the head of household, although I must also confess ignorance of the legal and social conventions at play. Was it possible for one member of a household (a parent) to “own” the Wirtschaft and for another to be responsible for the loan on it? Was a family elder living in a household owned by a younger family member still considered the head of that household? What exactly was the relation, if any, between ownership and one’s role as head of household? These questions, as well as the matter of how villages were laid out and how and under what conditions plots were assigned and later transferred, are sorely in need of thorough study.

Before we veer too far from the task at hand, we return our focus to Alexanderwohl 16. The index to the census lists three individuals:

Benjamin Benjamin (b. ca.-)
Ratzlaff, Johann Peter (b. ca.1780)
Unrau, Benjamin Goerg (b. ca.1800)

We will pick up with these three in the following post, as we continue to identify Alexanderwohl’s founding settlers.

Work Cited

Rempel. Peter. 2007. Mennonite Migration to Russia, 1788–1828. Edited by Alfred H. Redekopp and Richard D. Thiessen. Winnepeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.