South Dakota Bullers 5

This series has a simple goal: to learn as much as possible about the family of Heinrich Benjamin and Aganetha Dirks (or Agnetha Duerksen) Buller, whose immigration to the U.S. led them to settle near Parker, South Dakota. Thus far we have identified the two central figures, Heinrich and Aganetha, and located them within the Deutsch Wymsyle church, being part of the Brenkenhoffswalde group from Neumark that moved to that church during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The family story compiled by William B. Buller, Life Story of Heinrich Buller and His Wife Agnetha Duerksen Buller, will continue to guide our exploration. We last read a paragraph about Heinrich’s grandfather, also named Heinrich; I repeat that paragraph here, for context, then proceed with the rest of the account about Heinrich Benjamin’s grandfather Heinrich.

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.

Benjamin was born in the month of December, 1816 [sic], in Prussia, and when his father Heinrich Buller moved from Prussia to Poland, attended him on that journey, settling the village “Duetsch Wymysle”—Kreis Gostin, Post Combin, Warschau Government, Poland. Here to this day there resides a descendant of this Heinrich Buller, being the first cousin of father’s. He is a son of father’s uncle John and also bears the name of Heinrich Buller. From him, even now, an occasional letter drifts over to Father in which mention is sometimes made of places, circumstances, and events that still linger in Father’s memory just as youthful fancy planted them years ago in the morning of his life, and recalled now over the span of a full four score years.

Here, then, after migration from Prussia, the first (?) Heinrich Buller labored until his death in 1848, and here his sons, like him, were following the lowly walks of life, forced to be content with the simple laborer’s need and the hard fate that ever has been the lot of the poor from time immemorial. Here, no doubt, some, if not all, of them died and lie buried, and their sons in turn took up their labors and moved away searching ever for a better land of promise. What one of that number did, and whither the restless spirit of youth led him, we are soon to follow in these pages. (Buller 1915, 7)

For comments on the first paragraph, see the previous post (here).

1. The second paragraph begins with two errors. First, Benjamin Buller was born in 1806, not 1816. I suspect that this is a typographical slip, not an error of understanding, since William knew that his father was born in 1834, which would not easily accommodate an 1816 date of birth for Benjamin. Second, Benjamin was born in the month of November, not December (see the church record and GRANDMA screen here). His date of birth was actually 12 November 1806; whether this is given according to the older Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar is unclear to me, but either way the birth month was in November. Noting these errors serves as a good reminder not to accept family oral histories at face value. Even the best of memories will fade and grow fuzzy, and even the most careful scribe will introduce errors; all facts should be tested against contemporary documents and any other type of available evidence.

2. We do not know exactly when Heinrich and family migrated from Prussia (i.e., Brenkenhoffswalde in Neumark) to Poland, but it may be that they did so when other Bullers and Unruhs relocated to the Deutsch Wymsyle area sometime between 1817 and 1819 (see here). We cannot say that for certain, but sometime in the 1810s is the most probable time frame. According to Erich Ratzlaff (1971, 35), no families migrated from Neumark to Deutsch Wymsyle in the 1800s, while four did in the 1810s and another three in the 1820s, before the largest body (seven families) came in the 1830s (which was the same migration under Wilhelm Lange that led to the establishment of Gnadenfeld in Molotschna; see also here). Finally, presumably Prussia and Poland are used in William’s account with a generic geographical sense, not as political labels, since the Kingdom of Poland had ceased to exist well before this time.

3. The precise location of Deutsch Wymsyle in “Kreis Gostin, Post Combin, Warschau Government, Poland” is impressive but not entirely correct in all its details. The designation Kreis Gostin (District Gostin) reflects a Prussian organization; that precise term was used only between 1793 and 1807 and was replaced by the derivative Der Gostinische Kreis. The term Post appears to be a mistake, and the spelling Combin is an apparent error for Gombin, or, more correctly, Gąbin. Warschau is obviously Warsaw, the seat of the regional government. In the end, one cannot really fault Heinrich’s memory for missing a few details some sixty years after leaving the area.

4. According to the account, Heinrich Buller the grandfather died in 1848; if he was born around 1783, as his grandson claimed, he would have been roughly sixty-five. Heinrich is not mentioned in the Deutsch Wymsyle church records, but this is probably due to the records’ sparse coverage of the earliest members of the church. Ratzlaff writes, “The old church book [the one destroyed in the fire], which I saw in the house of my father, the elder Leonhard Ratzlaff, was not run from the beginning of the church” (Ratzlaff 1971, 34: Das alte Gemeindebuch, das auch ich im Hause meines Vaters, des Ältesten Leonhard Ratzlaff eingesehen habe, war nicht von Beginn der Gemeinde geführt worden). As we also noted earlier (here), of the 195 persons with birth years listed in the reconstructed book, only eleven were born before 1790. Thus it is not surprising that Heinrich the elder does not appear.

Heinrich’s son Benjamin, of course, is listed (see the extract here). It is also possible that Benjamin’s younger brother Heinrich is listed (scan below; see also here).

According to the account given above, Benjamin was Heinrich and Lena’s oldest child, followed by a son named Heinrich. Since Benjamin was born in 1806, the Heinrich Buller born 17 October 1808 in Brenkenhoffswalde could very well be that second son. Of course, without additional documentation this must remain a reasonable but unverified hypothesis.

Heinrich also mentions another relative who moved from Neumark to Deutsch Wymsyle: “Here to this day [1915] there resides a descendant of this Heinrich Buller, being the first cousin of father’s. He is a son of father’s uncle John and also bears the name of Heinrich Buller.” Clearly, then, John (or Johann), the youngest son of Heinrich and Lena, also settled in the Deutsch Wymsyle area with the rest of the family. Oddly, however, although John stayed long enough to have a son who remained in the community until at least 1915, he does not appear in the church name lists.

The account given above also implies that these three were not the only sons of Heinrich and Lena who moved from Brenkenhoffswalde to Deutsch Wymsyle:

Here, then, after migration from Prussia, … Heinrich Buller labored until his death in 1848, and here his sons, like him, were following the lowly walks of life, forced to be content with the simple laborer’s need and the hard fate that ever has been the lot of the poor from time immemorial. Here, no doubt, some, if not all, of them died and lie buried, and their sons in turn took up their labors and moved away searching ever for a better land of promise. 

The most natural reading of this text is that Heinrich and, presumably, all of his sons migrated from Brenkenhoffswalde to Deutsch Wymsyle and that either all of them died and were buried there or that some died there while others, perhaps (Heinrich does not claim to know), moved away in search of a better life, as he knows the next generation (their sons) certainly did.

Having said all we are able about the Heinrich Benjamin’s grandfather Heinrich, we are ready to turn to his own father, which we will do in the following post.

Works Cited

Buller, William B. 1915. Life Story of Heinrich Buller and His Wife Agnetha Duerksen Buller. Parker, SD: privately printed.

Ratzlaff, Erich L. 1971. Im Weichselbogen: Mennonitensiedlungen in Zentralpolen. Winnipeg: Christian Press.