Four Years and Counting

With apologies for the recent light blogging and a promise to pick up the pace once again (or at least to do my best to do so), I take a moment in this post to note that today, 15 June 2018, Buller Time blog turns four years old. Woohoo!

If you recall, Buller Time was launched on Father’s Day in 2014 with a simple post of a few lines and a photograph of a Mennonite barn in Molotschna colony (here). Since then we have covered a lot of miles, practically circling the globe from Kazakhstan on Russia’s east through Russia, Volhynia, Poland, Prussia, Germany, and the Netherlands in western Europe, then across the Atlantic and North America and all the way west to Hawaii. We have also covered a large number of topics, ranging from the size of a typical Wirstschaft in a Molotschna village to the reason a large body of Waldheim residents left the village within a decade of originally settling there, from the challenges in Prussian Poland that led so many Mennonites to emigrate to Russia to the hardships that our family experienced traveling in steerage class across the Atlantic in 1879, from life on an early nineteenth-century Volhynian estate to memories of both hard and good times on Grandpa and Grandma’s farm south of Lushton.

We have made a few mistakes but have also had some notable discoveries, not least in identifying the man the Przechovka church book knew only as *** Buller as George Buller, husband of Dina Thoms. With the help of good friends who are also more expert in matters of Mennonite history (thanks most of all to Glenn Penner), we have also extended our own family tree by more than a century. No longer do we meet a dead end at David and Helena Zielke Buller, the first couple listed in the Buller Family Record. We now have documented proof that David was the son of Benjamin, whose father was also named Benjamin, who was, we think, the son of Heinrich, who was the son of Hans, who was the son of George and Dina Thoms Buller—a couple who take us back to sometime in the latter half of the 1600s.

Another way to quantify the last four years is to consider the number of posts written. This post is, according to the blog totals in the right-hand margin, number 65 in 2018. Add that to the 116 of 2014, the 90 of 2015, the 200 of 2016, and the 107 of 2017, and the total to date is 578, roughly 144 a year, or one post every 2.5 days. 

It would take a lot of tedious work to calculate how much has been written, but we can extrapolate from 2016 and gain a reasonable sense of how wordy Buller Time has been. During that year, with its 200 posts, Buller Time published just over 172,000 words. Thus, each 2016 post was roughly 860 words long. If that average holds for all four years of posts—a reasonable enough assumption—then the total number of words published is approaching half a million: 860 x 578 = 497,080. Depending on the number of footnotes, headings, and figures (photographs, tables, and diagrams), a typical academic book averages around 400 words a page, often less. If we use the 400-word figure for our purposes, then the blog would fill nearly 1,250 pages—over four 300-page books. 

One final set of figures: the number of page visits to the blog. In this case it is impossible to calculate all the page visits over the last four years: the statistics kept by Blogger were inflated by Russian bot activity (seriously) in 2015–2016, so the current Google Analytics numbers begin only on 21 July 2016. In other words, we have less than two years of data. Since that day Buller Time has enjoyed 15,683 page visits, which translates into approximately 682 page visits a month, or 22.6 page visits per day. If we use this average to estimate the entire history of Buller Time, assuming that the visit rate the past two years is higher than it was the first two years, we can conservatively project a total of perhaps 27,000 page visits. In the blogging world, this is quite a small number (some blogs would be upset if they fell below that number in a day), but I consider it quite good for the descendants of a bunch of landless hicks from Molotschna colony.

Looking ahead, I do not expect us to run low on topics to discuss or questions to explore. Time is our only limitation, and even that is temporary, what with retirement being maybe a decade away. Thank you to all the Bullers and others who stop by and read and especially to those who take the time to write. In truth, I would continue to post even if Dad were my only reader, but it is also nice to know that others find some enjoyment, even value, in the Buller Time blog. As always, stay tuned not only for more explorations but also for more questions that we do not yet know but need to be asked.