Buller Time Turns Five

On 15 June 2018 we celebrated the anniversary of Buller Time’s launch by looking back over the first four years of the blog’s existence (see here). There is no need to repeat that information, although it is worth several paragraphs to update what was written there, before we rehearse the territory covered over the past twelve months.

Counting this post, Buller Time published 101 posts after the one on 15 June 2018, which brings our total to 679. Using our previous estimate of 860 words per post, this represents an additional 86,860 words, leading us easily past the half-million mark, since last year we estimated 497,080 words. If all Buller Time posts were assembled into book form, the total page count would exceed 1,450 pages. The material published just within the last twelve months would make for a nice 200-page book.

Over the past year, Buller Time enjoyed a modest increase in popularity. Since 15 June 2018 the blog has had 8,688 distinct page views, for an average of 724 per month and 23.8 per day. By way of comparison, the totals on this date a year ago were 682 page views per month and 22.6 per day. The majority of visitors are located in the United States: 66 percent. Canada accounts for the next largest portion, at 12 percent, with Germany adding another 5 percent of the audience. The remainder of users live in a wide variety of countries.

The posts of the past year ranged widely in terms of geography, chronology, and genealogy. Late June 2018 found us located in central Nebraska with pictures of Johann Siebert and Sarah Siebert Buller and their descendants (here and here) and photographs of Peter P and Margaretha Epp Buller’s house on the farm where Grandpa was born; in fact, the picture in question is the earliest photograph known to us of Grandpa himself (here and here). 

Most of our attention was given toward an earlier time and a distant place: the mid-nineteenth century and even earlier in Molotschna colony. Our long-running series on the village Alexanderwohl turned to the 1848 Gemeindebericht (community report), as we offered a translation and commentary on it in order to increase our understanding of the life experiences of our forebears and their neighbors (see here for the first post in the Gemeindebericht sequence). An unexpected finding along the way raised significant doubts about the Alexanderwohl claim to primacy as the heirs of the Przechovka church in Poland. In fact, we discovered that a substantial number of Przechovka church members had emigrated to Molotschna in 1819, the year before the arrival of the group that established Alexanderwohl.

The Przechovka Emigration series that followed confirmed our hunch that the Alexanderwohl group was not the first from Przechovka to resettle in Molotschna (see here for the initial post). We also learned during the course of this investigation that the earliest Przechovka members founded and took up residence in the Molotschna village known as Franztal. This, of course, led us to learn what we could about that Mennonite village, including translating and commenting on its 1848 community report (the Franztal series begins here). 

In addition to nineteenth-century Molotschna, we explored a twentieth-century Siberian village named Konstantinovka (begin here). This originally Mennonite village experienced profound change during the decades of Soviet rule, so much so that it today it has no Mennonite presence. In the late 1980s, however, a member of our larger family, one Heinrich Buller, still called the village home. 

Heinrich of Konstantinovka was not the only distant family member we covered. For example, we devoted considerable time to a Heinrich Buller and family who settled in South Dakota in late 1875, four years before our own immediate ancestors took up residence in Nebraska (see here for the first post in the series). Other Bullers we mentioned were more closely related, both brothers of Grandpa Chris Buller: Peter E Buller and Klaas P. Buller (see here).

One final member of our extended family, albeit by marriage, offers a segue to upcoming posts: Oma Buller (see here). This Mennonite grandmother also lived in a Siberian village, although much earlier than the Heinrich of Konstantinovka mentioned above. In fact, the photograph that we discovered of her (below) places her squarely in the late 1930s, during the Great Terror or Great Purge, a time of unprecedented oppression of anyone deemed an enemy of the state led by Joseph Stalin. 

As we will learn in the posts to come, Oma Buller was not the only one of our family to live through the events leading up to the Russian Revolution and the rise of the communist state during the first half of the twentieth century. It will be interesting to look back a year from now and see the ground that we have covered and the discoveries we have made.