Sarah Siebert Buller in 1900

In a previous post (here) I noted that Peter D Buller’s obituary located him “near Lushton” at the time of his death, which led to several questions: Where were Peter and family living at that time? When did the family leave their original farm in Hamilton County? Why did they move? Unfortunately, my additional research into the situation muddies the waters even more.

Lushton, if you recall, is located in the southeast corner of Henderson Township in York County. If Peter D lived near Lushton when he passed away, he would have been in York County and in either Henderson Township or perhaps Hays Township farther east. However, the 1900 U.S. Census, taken three years after Peter D’s death, has his widow Sarah Siebert Buller living in Farmers Valley Township of Hamilton County, as seen in the top portion of the census page below: Sarah and children and a servant are listed toward the bottom of the figure. (For a larger version of the complete page, see here.)

This is the same township of the same county where Peter D and Sarah first established their farm after moving from Molotschna to the United States. This raises several important question: Did Peter D and family actually leave the farm to live near Lushton? If so, did Sarah and the children return to the family farm after his death, or where they living someplace else in the same township?  

Although we (or at least I) cannot determine exactly where they lived within Farmers Valley Township, we can make a reasonably good case that they were not back on the farm. We begin by noting all of Peter D and Sarah’s neighbors on a portion of an 1888 plat map for Farmers Valley Township.

The Peter Buller farm is middle right. Surrounding him are, among others, Isaac Brown (or Braun), John Sparling, Henry Pankratz, Albert Williams, John Penner, Klas Friesen, Abram Dalke, and Bernhard Friesen. When we compare these names to the 1885 census sheet containing Peter and Sarah, we find nearly all of them listed before or after Peter’s entry. In other words, the list of names on the 1895 census roughly matches the names listed on the 1888 plat map.

This is not surprising, when we consider that census takers during that time traveled from house to house and farm to farm entering the names and other information for all the residents living there. The order of the names in the census reveals the census taker’s journey to record the information. Thus in the 1885 census, Henry Pankratz, who lived across the road to the north of Peter and Sarah, appears before them, while John Penner, who lived immediately to the west, is listed immediately after them. Then follow Abram Dalke, Bernhard Friesen, and so on. 

How does this help us interpret the 1900 census in which, three years after Peter’s death, Sarah is now the head of household? By and large, the names clustered around Sarah and the children are different from what they were in the 1895 census. Henry Pankratz, I should note, appears immediately after her, which might imply that Sarah was back on the original Buller farm. However, this appears to be nothing more than a coincidence, since many of the names we saw clustered in the 1885 census—John Sparling, Issac Braun, John Penner, and Bernhard Friesen—are clustered together again but appear four pages earlier than Sarah in the census, which would imply some geographical distance between them and Sarah. If they still lived close to each other, we would expect them to appear close to each other in the census.

It is possible, of course, that Sarah and family were living on the original Buller farm and that the census taker recorded their names and those of the Henry Pankratz family out of order. However, the simpler explanation is that they were now living somewhere else in Farmers Valley Township. Given the fact that two of the names listed before Sarah (Peter Griess and Fred Sigrist) lived in the extreme southeast corner of the township, it seems most likely that she lived in that vicinity, somewhere near Hamilton County’s earliest settlement: Farmers Valley (see here).

Whether that notion proves true remains to be seen. For now all we can say with reasonable certainty is that Peter D and family did leave the farm sometime prior to his death in 1897, that they were living near Lushton when he passed away, and that Sarah and her children moved yet again before the 1900 census to an unknown location in Farmers Valley Township of Hamilton County. As often, the more we learn, the more questions we have.