This series seeks to reconstruct and reproduce the life story of Heinrich Benjamin Buller (GM 28413) and Aganetha Dirks Buller (GM 103991), the progenitors of a family of Bullers who settled in the Parker, South Dakota, area in the mid-1870s. The previous post ended with Heinrich’s only memory of his great-grandfather; this post picks up the story with his grandfather Heinrich Buller.
His name was Heinrich Buller, and Father [i.e., Heinrich Benjamin Buller] was named in honor of him. He was born about 1783, in a little village (dorf) called Brinkervaus-wald (?) near Dresden, Prussia. He was a poor man and made his living as a day-laborer. His wife was a certain Lena Unruh. They had six children, named in order as follows: Benjamin, Heinrich, Andrew, Tobias, John, and Anna. Of these, the oldest, Benjamin, was Father’s father. (Buller 1915, 7)
The opening paragraph contains a wealth of information that requires clarification and warrants close attention.
1. We begin with a clarification: the village that William guesses to be Brinkervaus-wald is obviously the Neumark village named Brenkenhoffswalde. This is consistent with what we learned earlier about the place of birth for Heinrich Benjamin’s father. William locates the village near Dresden, Prussia; in fact, Dresden was roughly 150 miles to the southwest. I suspect that this is a misunderstanding for the town Driesen (modern Drezdenko), which was located less than 5 miles to the east of the Neumark villages.
2. Drawing upon the information given here, we can reconstruct the sequence of three generations: Heinrich > Benjamin > Heinrich Benjamin. As William notes, his father Heinrich was named after Heinrich’s grandfather; naming a son after his grandfather was a common practice at that time.
More important is the naming of the grandfather, since it provides information not previously known. Note carefully the GRANDMA entry for Heinrich’s father: Benjamin.
No father or mother is listed for Benjamin. Assuming that Heinrich Buller’s memory is correct (I know no reason to doubt it), we can now identify Benjamin’s father. Is it possible that we might do more, perhaps even find a link back to George Buller and Dina Thoms?
3. According to Heinrich Benjamin, his grandfather Heinrich was a poor man who made his living as a day laborer. This is an important observation, since it tells us where not to look for Heinrich. Earlier we surveyed a number of Praestations-Tabellen, or “land tax lists … [of] tenants on royal domain lands” (Goertz 2001, 47), for the Neumark villages Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal (see here and the following posts). There we listed a number of Bullers who leased plots of land for which they were liable to pay taxes. Heinrich Benjamin’s grandfather was a day laborer; he held no land lease and thus would not appear on the Praestations-Tabellen. This makes it virtually impossible for us to trace his lineage, since we have no way of locating him on one of the land plots and deducing his parentage by tracing the names of the leaseholder back through time.
We can locate Heinrich the grandfather in another manner of speaking. As a day laborer, he no doubt lived in the area of town set apart for those who did not own land (which may have been a third of the population at that time). In Brenkenhoffswalde, the so-called renters area was located to the east of the village farm plots, that is, on the far right side of the map below.
4. Although the name of the elder Heinrich’s father must remain unknown to us for the time being, it may be possible to suggest (!) from which line of Bullers he derived. The Buller chart below will help us to see the possibility.
As we have often observed, George Buller and Dina Thoms had three sons, so there are three primary lines of Bullers in our larger family. To start on the right, Peter had only one known son, and he went to Volhynia in 1803. A second son of Dina and George was named after his father; this George had two sons, both of whom lived and died in the Przechovka area.
A third son of George and Dina, named Hans, had three sons: Hans, George, and Heinrich. Our family, of course, is of the Heinrich line of Hans’s descendants (red font). To my knowledge, all the Bullers of Neumark stem from one of the other two lines, those of Hans (341) and George (342). Thus one might propose a working hypothesis that Heinrich the grandfather of Heinrich Benjamin was a descendant of either Hans or George. Peter (351) and his descendants were the most prominent Buller family in Brenkenhoffswalde. Perhaps Heinrich was a younger son in this family who ended up a day laborer because no plots were available for lease when he was ready to start a family. In the end, we must admit that we do not know—and probably never will know—the name of Heinrich’s father.
5. The name of Heinrich’s wife is also provided: Lena Unruh. There were several Unruh families in Brenkenhoffswalde; presumably Lena belonged to one of them.
6. The children born to Lena and Heinrich are named in order of birth: Benjamin, Heinrich, Andrew, Tobias, John, and Anna. It is tempting to suggest that their first son was named after his paternal grandfather, in which case we would know the name of Heinrich’s father. In the end, however, that is no more than a reasonable possibility that has no positive evidence in its favor.
A good deal of information was packed into the first paragraph about Heinrich the grandfather, and two more paragraphs remain. We will pick up the story there in the following post.
A good deal of information was packed into the first paragraph about Heinrich the grandfather, and two more paragraphs remain. We will pick up the story there in the following post.
Buller, William B. 1915. Life Story of Heinrich Buller and His Wife Agnetha Duerksen Buller. Parker, SD: privately printed.
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