Buller Time at Ten

Ten years ago today, on 15 June 2014, Father’s Day that year, Buller Time published its first and second posts. The first (here) consisted of a photograph of a Mennonite barn in Molotschna Colony and forty-eight words:

Mennonite barn located in the former Molotschna Colony, Ukraine. Chris Buller’s father, Peter P Buller, lived in the villages of Alexanderkrone and Kleefeld before coming to the United States with the rest of his family when he was ten. To read further about the Molotschna Colony, see here.

The second post (here), which showed a photo of a windmill outside of Alexanderkrone, Molotschna Colony, was two words longer:

This windmill stands outside of the Ukranian village of Hrushivka, the former Alexanderkrone, where Peter P Buller (father of Chris) was born in 1869. According to one report, the windmill was erected in 1852; if true, both Peter P and his father Peter D were well acquainted with this structure.

Buller Time—whose name was inspired by the “It’s Miller Time!” advertising campaign (in case you ever wondered)—was conceived as a place to connect with my closest relatives, “the family of Cornelius (Chris) Buller and Malinda Franz,” as the masthead explains. It was also a way to connect with and give back to my own dad, whose love for our family and its history created the same passion in me.

Countless words have followed those initial brief posts. Well, technically they are not countless, but I am too lazy to get an accurate tally. We can, however, make a reasonable guess about the total output of Buller Time blog.

Over the course of the past ten years, Buller Time has published 755 posts (counting this one):

2014:	116
2015:	90
2016:	200
2017:	107
2018:	128
2019:	38
2020:	10
2021:	0
2022:	4
2023:	23
2024:	39

A post published six years ago today observed that the average length of a post in 2016 (200 posts) was 860 words. I think that average length remains reasonable for the posts since then. For example, the first six posts published this month range from 440 to 1,386 words and average 963 words.

If we multiply the 755 posts published to date by the 860 word average, we arrive at a total of 649,300 words published on the blog during its first ten years. In book publishing terms, that is the equivalent of five 325-page books. 

That is a fair amount of content for any blog, and generating that content would not have been possible without the support and contributions of countless (there’s that word again) family members near and distant, friends of the blog more expert in matters of Mennonite history than I, and researchers and the resources they produced that inform and enlighten our different chapters of our family story.

Lord willing, Buller Time blog will continue to uncover and recover unknown chapters of our family story for another ten years (and beyond). I look forward to the family and friends I will meet, as well as the many things I will learn. along the way