South Dakota Bullers 6

With this post we continue the Life Story of Heinrich Buller and His Wife Agnetha Duerksen Buller, moving from Heinrich’s grandfather Heinrich to his father Benjamin. The account is brief and to the point.

I must therefore revert once more to Benjamin, the eldest of those children. As already noted, he lived and spent his day as a laborer on the farms adjoining this little village, helping with scythe and threshing flail the farmers round about as they needed help. Wages were low and the food provided poor and scant in quantity. Yet, he made a living.

Here also in the process of time, he married one Agnes Goertz by name, and on the 21st of July 1834, their second son was born to them, whom they called Heinrich. This son was our father. All the other children by this wife died in their infancy it appears—a sister by the name of Julia being the only child father can recall, and she died when only four years old. (Buller 1915, 8)

1. Just like his father Heinrich, Benjamin scratched out a living as a day laborer. In this instance we are afforded a glance at what that involved, at least as regards harvest time: Benjamin helped with the scythe in cutting the grain stalks and with the flail when it was time to thresh the harvested grain (see the image here). As William indicates, the pay for this level of physical labor was low, although it kept the family fed and alive.

2. We can supplement the report of Benjamin’s marriage to Agnes Goertz by adding that the wedding took place on 3 August 1832 (whether Julian or Gregorian I do not know). Benjamin was nearly twenty-six at that time; Agnes was three years his junior. Remarkably, we have a scan of the official record of the union (thanks to Glenn Penner for providing this). 

The bottom of the page is cut off, but the important parts are still visible and highlighted in red. One does not need to read Polish (I do not) to see that the first name Benjamin begins on one line and ends on the next, followed by his last name. The spelling of the names is not what we expect, but we can see two more instances of Buller two and three lines up from the Ben- line; the name three lines up is clearly Piotr Buler (I am uncertain about the function of the a-looking character at the end of each name). The name of Benjamin’s bride appears five lines below: Agnieska (?) Gortz.

Note also the marginal numbers indicated by the red arrows. The one opposite Benjamin’s name has an 11 with a line underneath, then a 22 over an 1806. The 1806 leads me to think that this is the year of Benjamin’s birth, so we can interpret the rest to indicate a month (November) and a day (22): 22 November 1806. The calendar being used then was the Julian, not the Gregorian that we use today, so we need to convert the date to Gregorian: 4 December 1806. Interestingly, this causes us to reconsider William Buller’s earlier statement that Benjamin was born in December. The reconstructed Deutsch Wymsyle church lists have Benjamin’s birth date as 12 November 1806, but that is probably an error; it should read 22 November 1806 = 4 December 1806, which means that William’s earlier comment about Benjamin being born in December (Gregorian) is likely correct.

Agnetha’s birth numbers are given in a different order, with a 22 over the line and a 9 below and 1809 below that: 22 September 1809, or 4 October 1809 Gregorian. The Deutsch Wymsyle church records give a date of 29 September 1809. Without a birth record to adjudicate matters, we cannot say which of the dates given are correct—although the ones from the Polish (Russian) civil records are the most likely candidates.

This is not the only civil record available for this family of Bullers, so we will pick up the story with the second paragraph of the Benjamin account in the following post.