Peter P and Margaretha’s House

Over the past four years we have often had occasion to reference the Buller Family Record, which we all know offers the most complete listing of the descendants of David and Helena Zielke Buller ever assembled. Of course, our family is not the only one to have a record book listing its members. 

As noted in a recent post (here), the Johann Siebert family also has its book, titled In the Days of Our Youth: The Mennonite Heritage and Descendants of Johann and Cornelius Siebert. Contrary to what is stated in that post, this book was compiled in 1980 by Elsie Helen Huebert, wife first of Arlie E. Friesen and then of Willard J. Epp. My apologies for the earlier mistake.

The Johann Siebert book was not the only one that Elsie put together; in 1991 she also assembled a book for the family of her second husband. The book is titled Episodes of the Prairie Pioneers: Five Branches from the Family Tree of Heinrich Epp: Heinrich, Cornelius, Peter, Johann, Gerhard. This book, like the Johann Siebert one, is of interest to our family, since this is the family line of our own Margaretha Epp Buller, wife of Peter P.

Best of all, Mark Dillon, the great-grandson of HP Buller who earlier provided photographs of great interest to Buller Time, has original copies of both of these family books, and he graciously provided them to me to scan, which I have now done. 

All that is background to the main point of this post: Episodes of the Prairie Pioneers includes a photograph of the Peter P and Margaretha house from the first decade of the twentieth century. 

Considering that this is a scan of a copy of the photograph printed in a book, the quality is actually quite good. The photo is accompanied by a caption that reads:

The Peter P. Buller Family — New house in 1905 

Katharina, Margaretha, Margaretha Buller, Cornelius, 

Elizabeth, Sara, Benjamin, Klaus and Peter P. Buller 

Not pictured: Maria, Peter, Anna and Henry

The photo and caption require some unpacking. First, to begin at the end, implied but left unstated is that Maria, Peter, Anna, and Henry are not pictured because they had not yet been born. Those four were born in 1908, 1911, 1913, and 1915, respectively.

The two adults in the picture are easy to spot: Margaretha Epp Buller with the umbrella and Peter P in a hat at the far right of the photo. The children in between are identified as Katharina (born 1895), Margaretha (1892), Cornelius (1906), Elizabeth (1904), Benjamin (1897), and Klaas (the preferred spelling; 1902). 

Cornelius, or Grandpa Chris, may not be visible at first glance, but he should be in this closer look.

Grandpa Chris is the infant in the carriage at Margaretha’s side. He is clearly quite young, one might guess six months or younger. Since Grandpa was born 17 April 1906, we might reasonably date the photo to sometime in the summer of 1906. The fact that Grandpa was alive at this time means that the photograph caption is mistaken in dating the picture to 1905.

This is certainly the earliest picture we have of Grandpa Chris, probably the earliest photo that ever existed. Important as that family archival record is, the house also deserves further attention, since the house is still standing and has even appeared in an earlier post. We will return to the house, then, in the following post.