Peter P, Brother in Deed 1

As promised at the end of the previous post, we are returning to a passing comment that Henry P Buller made while reminiscing about his parents. Specifically, Henry recounted that in 1936 his parents “moved to southern California, where there was a gentleman—Pete Janzen—who Dad had helped to come from Russia in the early 1920s.” There is clearly more behind a remark such as this than immediately meets the eye. Fortunately, in this instance we are able to fill in some of the background both on Pete Janzen and the broader situation.

We begin, not with Pete Janzen, but with someone Janzen knew: Henry D. Remple. In 2001, Remple authored From Bolshevik Russia to America: A Mennonite Family Story (thanks to Carolyn Stucky for alerting me to it). This book, based on Remple’s diary, recounts the following story:

In 1922, six families from a tiny village in the Ukraine began a harrowing journey to America that would pit them against disease, starvation, and physical exhaustion. Ahead of them loomed an arduous route over thousands of miles of land and sea; behind them lay the ravages of World War I, the terrors of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and the misery of drought and famine. Among the émigrés was Henry D. Remple, who was just thirteen years old when his parents made the decision to leave their village with their nine sons and daughters. Of his eleven family members who left their village, only Henry and two sisters survived the voyage and reached their new home in America. Much of their journey to freedom is recorded in Henry’s diary, faithfully kept from 1922–1928. Captured among Henry’s diary entries and the reflections of he and his sisters are the experiences of their family and neighbors, all descendants of German-speaking Mennonites who had settled in the Ukraine years earlier. Nearly eighty-five years after it was written, the diary is a testament to the will to survive and the strength of the human spirit. (book blurb)

The book includes the text of Henry Remple’s diary, interspersed with explanations and elaborations from Henry, his sisters Agnes and Agatha, and, occasionally, Henry’s wife Mariana. Within this account of the Remple family’s experiences we encounter Pete Janzen, the man whom Peter P Buller had helped to come to the United States. More remarkably, in one of Henry’s explanatory paragraphs, we read of Peter P himself. 

Our transit visa to Constantinople was good for six months. We now eagerly awaited news from our sponsors in America. The Mennonite Central Committee routinely notified Peter Janzen when money from sponsors arrived. One day Peter Janzen told Agatha that a Peter Buller from Lushton, York County, Nebraska, had sent $600.000, i.e. $200.00 for each of us. That amount would cover our ocean and rail fare to York, Nebraska, a small clothing allowance and a reserve of $25.00 per person, which each immigrant was required to have when entering the United States. (Remple 2001, 104)

Henry’s sister Agnes adds further details: 

We learned later that Mr. Buller, a well-to-do farmer and minister, had read in church papers about the refugees in Batum and recruited relatives and church members to sponsor some of the refugees. He himself sponsored six refugees, including Peter Janzen. A George Rempel, Mr. Buller’s relative, thought the Rempel orphans [i.e., Henry, Agnes, and Agatha] might be relatives, so he sponsored Agatha. Mr Buller’s daughter, Mrs. Klaus Friesen, and her husband sponsored Henry. Mr. and Mrs. Abram Thiessen sponsored me. Mrs. Thiessen and Mr. George Rempel were sister and brother. (Remple 2001, 104–5)

The information packed into these brief accounts, as well as the background circumstances lying behind these events, will take some time to explore and explain. A number of questions come immediately to mind:

• What circumstances led the Remples and other Mennonites to leave their homes?
• Where did their journey begin, and where did it lead them on their way to the United States?
• How did the Mennonite Central Committee assist these Mennonites on their journeys?
• Who was Pete Janzen, and what role did he play in this migration to the United States?
• How did Peter P work with the Mennonite Central Committee in sponsoring immigrants?
• Who in Peter P’s circle of relatives, friends, and church members supported this effort?

No doubt additional questions will arise as we pursue answers to this initial set. In addition, Peter P and family are mentioned elsewhere in Henry Remple’s book, which will give us additional information and insights into this historically significant and personally important series of events.

Thus far we know that Peter P showed himself to be a brother in deed by sponsoring and encouraging others to sponsor Mennonites in need of assistance in making their way to the United States, where they could establish new homes and new lives. Much more waits to be discovered, I am confident, as we seek to learn more about this piece of Mennonite history and our family’s involvement in it.

Work Cited

Remple, Henry D. 2001. From Bolshevik Russia to America: A Mennonite Family Story. Pine Hill Press.

Henry P Buller, Scholar

Buller Time has alluded to Henry Buller’s academic pursuits from time to time. In what may have been the first mention of Henry, for example, a 2014 post (here) contained his and his wife Bea’s obituaries. Henry’s obituary reported, among other things:

He received a bachelor’s degree from Bethel College, North Newton, Kan., in 1941. After completing his alternative service, the Bullers moved to Newton, Kan., in 1947, where Henry taught in area public schools. He later received his graduate degree in psychology and counseling from the University of Kansas in Lawrence. In 1961 he joined the faculty of the Lamar University psychology department, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. 

A 1 June 1936 York Daily News-Times story allows us to trace Henry’s scholarly trajectory even earlier. According to this account, Henry placed third among 1,400 seniors from 406 Nebraska high schools in a University of Nebraska scholarship contest.

Although 250 of the 1,400 seniors who entered the competition won some sort of regents’ scholarship to attend the University of Nebraska, presumably the top finishers received the highest awards. The dollar amount of the awards is unknown, as is the type of competition (test?) that the seniors underwent and when it took place.

All we really know is the identify and future plans of the top three finishers. This is where it becomes curious. According to the newspaper account, Henry planned “to enter the college of arts and sciences this fall,” that is, the fall of 1936 (recall that the winners were announced in the 1 June 1936 issue). 

However, 1936 was a momentous year for the Peter P Buller family for another reason: this was the year that Peter P, Margaretha, and their unmarried children (Sara, Maria, and Henry) moved from the farm north of Lushton to California. There is a clear disconnect between the August 1936 move west and Henry’s stated plans to enter the University of Nebraska at roughly the same time. It raises the question, When did Peter P and Margaretha decide to move west? 

If they decided before the competition took place, then Henry’s plan to attend the University of Nebraska may have been more a wish than an expectation. That is, perhaps Henry hoped to convince his parents to allow him to remain in Nebraska so he could start school in the fall. If the decision took place sometime after the competition, then it seems likely that Henry’s original plans fell apart with that decision.

It does not help that we do not know when the competition took place, but presumably it was sometime during the spring term, perhaps in April or May. One thing we do know is that Peter, Margaretha, Sara, and Maria visited Peter P’s brother J. P Buller in Hawaii from early December 1935 to late March 1936 (see here). Henry stayed behind, since he was still attending high school. Is it possible that the decision was made after the four returned from their ocean cruise? One could draw this impression from Henry’s reminiscences about his early life:

Well in 1936, after having a vacation in Hawaii with Maria and Sarah, they moved to southern California, where there was a gentleman—Pete Janzen—who Dad had helped to come from Russia in the early 1920s. He convinced Dad that southern California was the place to retire, and they came home and talked about buying some orange groves and sitting under the trees, picking them and eating them. Well, they had the sale of the farm in the summer of 1936, and we took off. (see here)

Although we cannot say for certain, it seems plausible that Peter P visited with Pete Janzen, who appears to have lived in California in 1936, either prior to or after the voyage from San Francisco to Honolulu, at which time Pete Janzen encouraged Peter P to retire in southern California. Not long after, Peter P decided to do just that. In Henry’s words, “they came home and talked about buying some orange groves.”

If this proposed reconstruction of events is accurate, then it is entirely possible that Henry did plan to attend the University of Nebraska when he entered the competition. However, by the time he learned of his third-place finish, those plans had been superseded by his parents’ decision to move the entire family to California. So it was that Henry’s academic career was placed on hold—at least for a time.

But what of the report that Peter P had helped Pete Janzen to relocate from Russia to the US? Well, that intriguing detail deserves its own future post.

 

Family Letters: AI Edition

On occasion I have mentioned items from our family history that Carolyn (Peters) Stucky shared for posting on the blog. Among those items were photographs (here), a 1944 newspaper that Henry Buller had read while being held prisoner by the Nazis (here), an agricultural workbook that Henry had created years earlier (more on that later), and letters that Grandpa Chris’s sister Sara had collected over a number of years, spanning 1907 to 1931.

Most of the letters are written in English and are easy enough to read. However, seven of them, written between 1925 and 1928, all sent by Marie Siebert, are in German cursive. I have limited ability to decipher German cursive, so when I was scanning the larger batch of letters for posterity (i.e., archiving), I initially thought that I would not spend time to capture something that I would probably never read. At the last moment, however, I changed my mind and scanned the entire batch. I am happy that I did. Why?

Recently the world has been abuzz with excitement about the promise (or the dangers) of artificial intelligence (AI). Many of the claims (and fears) are way overblown, in my view: AI will neither save nor destroy the world. That being said, some AI-powered apps are quite good. Several translation programs now produce remarkably accurate and idiomatic renderings of one language into another, of German, for example, into English.

Another application that recently came to my attention is an AI-powered program that recognizes and analyzes the handwriting of the scribes of the Great Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran (see, e.g., here). This got me to thinking: if AI could be trained to recognize the Hebrew script written by scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls over two thousand years ago, then perhaps someone had already developed an app that could read (i.e., recognize) German cursive written in the early twentieth century. It turns out that someone has.

The online app Transkribus (see here) was the the first option that came to my attention, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. I uploaded a page of a letter from Marie to Sara (the one shown above), and within 15 seconds the app had worked its magic and produced a reasonably accurate transcription of the letter.

The screen shot above gives a good idea of how the app works. One uploads a .jpeg image of the text to be transcribed, then Transkribus “scans” the image multiple times and outputs the transcribed text seen. Another nice feature of the app is that holding one’s mouse over a particular line of text highlights it on both the image and the transcription. In this example, I held my mouse over the second line of the letter body, which prompted Transkribus to draw a line around the text in the image and highlight in gray the corresponding text in the transcription. This feature is helpful for making close comparisons between the original text and AI-generated transcription.

The resulting transcription is reasonably accurate but not perfect. Note, for example, that the 8 of the year at the top is missing. Further, the salutation is broken into two lines: Liebe / Consine Sara (as are several other lines), and the 3 in line 8 of the transcription is a phantom (the app is reading a blank space). Finally, in a few cases the app seems to misread a word. 

Still, with the transcription providing a head start, it is not difficult to correct the few errors and produce a serviceable text. In this case, Transkribus enabled me to recover the entire two-page letter with a fairly high degree of confidence: 

Jan 20, 1928

Liebe Cousine Sara:

Ich habe in letzter Zeit viel an dich gedacht so will ich den mal ein paar Zeilen schreiben. Ich habe ein paar mal gefragt wie es dir geht und es würde gesagt es geht dir gut. Aber freilich weiß ich aus Erfahrung das wenn man nach einer Operation auch gut tut. so fühlt man mitunter doch noch sehr sich Glecht. wünsche sehr das Du jetzt ganz gesund werden könntest und wieder mit neuem Mut in die Zukunft blicken. Ich weiß ja Erfahrung wie einem an zu Mute ist wenn die Hoffnung verschwunden ist. Aber die auf den Herrn harren kriegen neue Kraft u.s.w. 

Seit Letzten Mittwoch haben wir in der Kirche sehr schöne Abendversammlungen gehabt. Gestern abend war zum letzten mal. Rev. P. P. Wedel von Kansas war der Redner. Du wirst vieleicht gehört haben das er kommen wollte. 

Bei deinen Eltern bin ich noch nicht gewesen will aber nächtens hin zu gehen. habe aber schon mit deiner Mama in der Kirche gesprochen. Das Wetter ist eine Zeitlang sehr schön gewesen, jetzt ist es ziemlich kalt. Zum Schluß wünsche ich die Gottes Segen. 

Auf wiedersehen, 

Marie Siebert

Translated into English, the letter reads as follows:

Dear cousin Sara:

I have been thinking about you a lot lately, so I wanted to write you a few lines. I have asked a few times how you are doing, and I was told that you are doing well. But of course, I know from experience that, even if you are doing well after an operation, you still feel very weak at times. I sincerely hope that you will now be able to recover completely and look to the future with renewed courage. I know from experience how it feels when hope is gone. But those who wait on the Lord will gain new strength, etc.

Since last Wednesday, we have had very nice evening meetings at church. Last night was the last one. Rev. P. P. Wedel from Kansas was the speaker. You may have heard that he was coming. 

I haven’t been to see your parents yet, but I want to go tonight. I already spoke to your mother at church. The weather has been very nice for a while, but now it’s quite cold. Finally, I wish you God’s blessings. 

Goodbye,

Marie Siebert

And just like that, albeit with a huge assist from technology, we have a window back into our family past some ninety-seven years ago. The day the letter was written, 20 January 1928, was a Friday. As we see on the envelope below, the letter was postmarked the same day. Obviously, Marie wrote the letter early enough in the day to have it postmarked in the Lushton post office the same day (the postmark actually says “A.M.”). This also means that the evening meetings at the church, presumably Bethesda Mennonite Church in Henderson, Nebraska, had begun on “last Wednesday,” or 11 January, and had finished on the Thursday evening before, or 19 January.

What else can we glean from the letter and its envelope? The letter was mailed from Lushton and was addressed to Sara at the Mennonite Hospital in Beatrice, Nebraska. Earlier (here and here) we discovered that sometime in 1927 (we think) Sara had taken a job at the Mennonite Deaconess Home and Hospital in Beatrice. Thus it is not surprising that the letter was addressed to Sara there. However, the body of the letter indicates that in January 1928 Sara was not a worker but rather a patient at the hospital. Marie references some sort of an operation and her hopes for Sara’s continued recovery.

Who is Marie Siebert? Note first that she identifies her as Sara’s cousin, so we know she was a relative, not merely a close friend. As far as I can tell, she was the daughter of Cornelius Siebert, who was Sarah Siebert Buller’s brother. That would make her a first cousin to Peter P Buller (Sara’s father) and thus a first cousin once removed to Sara herself. If I have identified the correct Marie Siebert (I know of no other reasonable possibilities), then she was nearly seven years older than Sara: born on 24 November 1892, Marie was thirty-six when the letter was written; born 30 September 1899, Sara was twenty-nine at that time. Sadly, Marie died less than five years later, a week shy of her fortieth birthday.

One person referenced in the letter remains: P. P. Wedel. In all likelihood, this individual was the elder at the First Mennonite Church of Christian (Moundridge, Kansas). According to the GAMEO article on that church, written by none other than P. P. Wedel himself (here), Wedel served as elder from 1917 to 1951. Another GAMEO article describes Wedel as “a longtime leader in the General Conference Mennonite Church” (here). Given Wedel’s prominence in Mennonite circles and his proximity to Nebraska, the P. P. Wedel mentioned in these GAMEO articles seems almost certainly the one who led the evening meetings that Marie references.

Still, several questions remain unanswered: What operation had Sara undergone? Further, since Marie says that she knew from experience how weak one feels after an operation, what operation had she undergone and when? For now, these details must remain unknown. Perhaps another letter or document from some other time will shed light on them and allow us to fill in even more blanks in our family history. 

Peter D and Sarah’s Farm 21

The previous post in this series (here) evaluated Peter D and Sarah’s level of success by comparing their farm productivity to that of their closest neighbors as reported on the agricultural schedule for the 1885 Nebraska census. That post, after considering farm size and land value, the value of farm goods produced, crop distribution, and crop yields and revenue, drew the following conclusions: In 1885, six years after settling in Nebraska, Peter D and Sarah were among the larger landholders in the immediate area, with possession of a full quarter section, 160 acres. However, a significant amount of that land was as yet undeveloped, and of the land that was available for raising crops, 11 percent was left fallow. In addition, for whatever reason, Peter D and Sarah fell somewhat below the average yields that their neighbors enjoyed. As a result of the limited amount of land available and the lower than average yields, they also reported a lower value of all farm productions.

There are, of course, other angles from which to examine their financial position. This balance of this post will explore one of those angles. This time, instead of comparing the Buller farm’s productivity to that of their neighbors, we will calculate it relative to the value of the land they owned and then compare that to twenty-first-century figures. One might loosely think of this as calculating and then comparing returns on (land) investment (ROI).

We begin with an admittedly simple-minded calculation of the ROI of a modern farm raising corn. I recognize that today’s farmers incur significant additional expenses to raise each crop; for the sake of a clean comparison, however, we will limit our focus strictly to land value, not the other costs associated with raising a crop today (e.g., machinery, fuel, fertilizer, seed corn). 

According to the AcreValue website (see here), the average value of an acre of farmland in Hamilton County, Nebraska, is $7,703; since the Buller farm was located in Hamilton County, we will use that figure (I note that the value of land in York County is somewhat less, at $6,922 an acre). 

The UNL Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources CropWatch newsletter for 23 January 2025 (here) reports that the average Nebraska corn yield for 2024 was 188 bushels per acre. Finally, the CropWatch newsletter for 27 February 2025 reports that the average price paid per bushel of corn in 2024 was $4.45.

Based on these figures, we can calculate that an average acre of land in Nebraska would produce $836.60 in revenue (188 bushels × $4.45 a bushel). When we divide that figure by the value of the land, $7,703, we can conclude that the revenue produced by that acre would equal 10.9 percent of the value of the land ($836.60 ÷ $7,703.00). Again, these calculations do not reflect the actual costs or profits of raising corn today; they merely give us a benchmark against which we can compare the performance of Peter D and Sarah’s farm in 1885.

We discovered in an earlier post in this series (here) that the 1885 Buller farm was valued at $20 an acre ($3,200 ÷ 160 acres). In 1885 Peter D reported planting 27 acres that produced 900 bushels of corn, for an average of 33.3 bushels an acre. The price of corn that year was 25¢ a bushel, so the average revenue per acre of corn was $8.33. In other words, the revenue produced by an acre of corn equaled 41.7 percent of the value of the land ($20.00 ÷ $8.33). This is a substantially higher return than farmers in 2024 might expect.

Of course, Peter D and Sarah planted only 27 acres in corn. Another 60 acres was planted to wheat and generated $8.16 an acre, which is comparable to the average revenue per acre of corn. The rest of the 160 acres was planted to other crops (28 acres) or left fallow or undeveloped (45 acres). Perhaps, then, a more realistic comparison is the total value of the goods produced (whether for sale or consumption). In 1885, Peter D reported $652 in total farm production, or $4.08 per acre owned ($652 ÷ 160 acres). This equals 20.4 percent of the value of the land. Although this is substantially less than the corn-based ROI calculated above (40.7 percent), it is still nearly double the comparable 2024 figure.

What can we conclude from all this? According to the 1885 agricultural schedule, Peter D and Sarah’s farm produced a much higher return on their land investment than any farmer today would ever expect. If they had planted all 160 acres available to them in corn (not a realistic option at that time), they could have generated revenue equal to the value of their land in a little over two years. Even at the lower rate of return generated by the actual acres cultivated, the Buller farm was on pace to generate revenue equal to the value of the land in less than five years. Today’s corn farmers, by comparison, need at least ten years to generate revenue equal to the value of their land (and that does not account for the high costs of producing corn today).

Although we should not push this comparison too far, it is obvious that, relative to the costs incurred and revenue earned by corn farmers today, Peter D and Sarah’s farm was remarkably profitable. When one considers further (1) that they had purchased only 80 of the 160 acres that they owned (the other 80 acres becoming theirs through the Homestead Act; see here) and (2) that they had purchased those 80 acres (now valued at $20 an acre) for $900, or $11.25 an acre (see here), their success appears even greater. 

In short, Peter D and Sarah invested $900 to purchase their initial 80 acres and nothing at all for the 80 acres they were homesteading. The $652 in revenue reported for 1885 was equal to more than two-thirds of their original investment. Even if only half of each year’s revenue was applied to the loan on their land, they would have paid off the cost of their farm in less than three years. This helps us to understand how, so soon after arriving in central Nebraska, Peter D and Sarah were able to purchase yet another 80 acres northeast of Henderson (see here). For these early Bullers, the United States truly was a land of opportunity.