I can think of no better way to end this year than by sharing a significant discovery … and an ongoing mystery. Before we turn to that discovery (and mystery), we must first go back eight years, to a series of posts published in September 2016. Those posts, titled “Partible, Bilateral Inheritance … and Bullers” (here, here, and here), explored Mennonite inheritance practices in imperial Russia during the nineteenth century and here in North America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In that series we learned that the usual practice, when either a wife or husband died, was to transfer one half of the estate to the surviving spouse and to divide the other half equally between the couple’s children. To quote Royden Loewen’s explanation from the earlier post,
Mennonites carried to North America in the 1870s a culture of bilateral partible inheritance. “Partibility” meant that the estates were divided, often literally, into fragmented eighty-, forty-, and even twenty-acre parcels. “Bilaterality” meant that both sexes, girls and boys, inherited land equally. (Loewen 2001, 26)
To repeat myself from the same post, bilaterality—treating female and male descendants equally in the distribution of inheritance—reflected the Mennonite desire to obey the implications of 1 Peter 3.7: since husbands and wives were joint-heirs in the grace of spiritual life, they should also be joint heirs with regard to the goods of this life. In other words, both female and male children were to receive the same portion as heirs of a departed parent. The easiest way to accomplish this, of course, was to divide up the estate and to give each heir an equal “part.”
The division of a deceased parent’s estate did not follow a rigid formula; rather, as explained in the earlier posts, the division among the heirs took account of the peculiarities of the situation and sought to apply the guiding principles of partibility and bilaterality to the situation as practically as possible. Keeping all this in mind, we are ready to turn to our discovery: a notice of real-estate transfers in the 7 March 1923 issue of The Aurora Republican (p. 4).
Near the bottom of this excerpt we see an entry of interest:
Heinrich P. Buller and wife to Helena H. Penner, W. D. $602. Our und. 1-10 interest in NE¼ NE¼ 12-9-5.
The next entry, for Johann Buller and his wife’s transfer of property to Helena H. Penner, records the same selling price ($602) but a different property description: the E½ of the N½ of the NE¼ of 12-9-5. Unless I am mistaken, the E½ of the N½ of the NE¼ is the same property as the NE¼ of the NE¼. The figure below illustrates what I mean.
The figure represents a full section of land, a mile square. The grayed area in the upper right shows the northeast quarter (NE¼) of the section. This corresponds to the quarter section of land (160 acres) that Peter D and Sarah Buller owned during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The northeast quarter of the northeast quarter (NE¼ NE¼) is the darker gray area; this is the 40 acres referenced in the entry for Heinrich. The horizontal dashed line divides the north and south halves of the quarter; the vertical dashed line divides the east and west halves of the quarter. If I understand the description correctly, the E½ of the N½ of the NE¼ is exactly the same piece of land as the NE¼ of the NE¼. I have no idea why different descriptions are used for the same piece of land.
Following that, the entry for Jacob P. Buller (single) parallels that for Heinrich in terms of price and the note about “Und. int.” but then uses the same property description (E½ of the N½ of the NE¼) as the Johann entry.
Following on at the top of the right-hand column we encounter yet another type of entry:
Sarah Dick, guardian, to Helena H. Penner, guardian’s deed, $25. NE¼ NE¼ 12-9-5.
The Sarah mentioned here was Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller’s sixth child, born 22 September 1877. She had married Peter Dick on 13 March 1898. Do the references to a guardian and a guardian’s deed mean that she was the guardian for someone else or that a guardian had been appointed for her when her father died? She was an unmarried twenty-year-old when Peter D passed away, so the latter seems possible, but her younger sister Marie M Buller was only seven, yet we hear nothing of a guardian in relation to her.
The final entry for the sale of the northeast 40 acres of section 12 in Farmers Valley Precinct (i.e., 12-9-5) lumps all the remaining heirs together:
Katharina Epp, et al., to Helena H. Penner, W. D. $4,214. NE¼ NE¼ 12-9-5.
The abbreviation et al. stands for the Latin et alii, which means “and others.” In other words, this entry records the sale of land by Katharina Epp (Peter D and Sarah’s third child, who married Heinrich G. Epp) and all of the rest of the children not listed separately: Peter P, David S, Cornelius P, Sarah P (!), Abraham P, and Marie M. The amount paid, $4,214, equals seven shares of the property at $602, the same price that the three individual entries—Heinrich P, Johann P, and Jacob P—were paid for their share of the land being sold. It appears that, instead of listing all ten children separately, the newspaper saved space by listing several that provided the outlines of the transaction and then combined everyone else together in the final entry.
Now that we have all the facts in front of us, we can make a few observations.
1. Each of Peter D and Sarah’s children had an equal share of the 40-acre plot, of the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of 12-9-5. Note that Heinrich’s and Jacob’s entries specifically state that each had a “1-10” interest (or int.) of the land. Peter D and Sarah had ten children living when Peter D passed away, and at least this 40 acres was divided equally between the children. This is the bilaterality mentioned above.
2. Several of the entries include the abbreviation “und.,” which stands for undivided. That is, the 40 acres had not been divided into ten 4-acre plots, each of which was inherited by a child; rather, each child had a one-tenth share in (ownership of) the undivided 40 acres. In this instance, then, partibility meant division of ownership among the heirs but not literal division of the property into equal plots.
Even though some of the details remain unclear or unknown (e.g., Sarah’s guardianship issue), we can say with certainty that the northeast 40 acres of Peter D and Sarah’s original farm stayed in the family until 1923, when all ten (living) children sold it to Helena H. Penner, a widowed neighbor who owned 80 acres in the northwest quarter of the same section.
Of course, this leaves open the question of what happened to the other 120 acres of Peter D and Sarah’s farm. Who owned that property after Peter D’s death? Further, when did it pass to someone (and how) outside of the family? At the moment, that remains a mystery. A subsequent post will explore these questions in hopes of gaining a clearer understanding of the disposition of our family’s original stake in the U.S.
Work Cited
Loewen, Royden. 2001. Hidden Worlds: Revisiting the Mennonite Migrants of the 1870s. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
