Buller Family Reunion

Thanks to Mary Henrichson for the following report and photos!

The Buller Family Reunion was held June 28 at the Hope Community Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a total of twenty-six in attendance: Wayne and Bev Buller, Matilda Klippenstein, Mary Henrichson, Chris Harmon, Dave Penner, Michelle and Clara Gardner, Martha and Nikita Myles, David Connelly, Steve Buller, Dan Buller, Lois and Mel Steggs, Charlotte and Jerry Zieg, Kelli and Mark Zieg and their two sons, Nicole Vance, Marcia and Tom Tomes, and Dennis and Melissa Thorne.

We had lots of good food, fun games, and time for fellowship. Dan Buller, who drove up from Texas, came the farthest. The youngest attendee was Clara Gardner, granddaughter of Dave Penner; the oldest was Matilda Klippenstein.

The next reunion is scheduled for June 27, 2015, to be held at Charlotte and Jerry Zieg’s in Beaver Crossing. Hopefully by then they will be pretty much recovered from the tornado damage. The same three cousins will serve on the planning committee for another year: Marcia Tomes, Steve Buller, and Mary Henrichson. If you have any suggestions of things to do, we would love to hear from you!

Matilda Klippenstein, Wayne and Bev Buller

Above: Martha and Nikita Myles, Michelle and Clara Gardner, Dave Penner, Matilda Klippenstein, David Connelly,
Mary Henrichson; below: Chris Harmon

Dennis and Melissa Thorne, Jerry and Charlotte Zieg, Nicole Vance, Kelli and Mark Zieg and their two sons, Tom and Marcia Tomes  

Charlotte and Jerry Zieg, Nicole Vance, Kelli and Mark Zieg and their two sons

Charlotte and Jerry Zieg and their two grandsons

Buller reunion

If anyone attending the Buller reunion in Lincoln, Nebraska, would like to send photographs of the festivities, I will post them on blog for all the family to enjoy. I can generally handle emails up to 10 MB, so feel free to send them to my email address given in the Buller Family Record post. Be sure to identify everyone in the photo, so we can put names with faces that may not look the same as they used to!

Lushton farm

As those of you roughly my age or older no doubt recall, Grandpa and Grandma owned and worked a farm south of Lushton. This is not the same “farm home near Lushton” mentioned with regard to Margaretha Epp on the Peter P page of the Buller Family Record. Rather, this farm is the southwest quarter of section 36, Henderson Township, York County.

My understanding is that Grandpa purchased 40 acres of the farm about the time Grandma and he were married and that Grandpa’s father (Peter P) bought another 40 acres as a gift to the couple. I believe the land was purchased from John Runnalls (listed as the owner in the 1911 map above), but I know little beyond that.

If any of you would like to fill in details on Grandpa and Grandma’s farm, feel free to email me the information or to add your voice in the comments to this post. Questions that I have include:

• In what year was the original purchase made?
• Were all 160 acres purchased then (I assume they owned the entire quarter at some point), or was an initial purchase of 80 acres followed by a second purchase of 80 acres?
• What buildings were on the farm when they bought it? What buildings did they add?
• What was the original purchase price (per acre)?
• Who did Grandpa and Grandma sell the farm to and when?
• What do those of you who grew up on the farm remember about it (I remember hearing something about rats)?

Today all the buildings are gone (see below), but not the memories. I suspect that some of you also have photographs of the house, the outbuildings, and the farm itself. I would be happy to scan any and all photos that you have, so contact me via email (see the Buller Family Record post), and we can work out the details.

Buller Family Record

The Buller book is online and can be downloaded from here (28 July 2014). This is a large PDF file (46 MB), so you will need to download the file to your computer and then open it in Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Pro. Because of the file size, Google will not preview it online or scan it for viruses (no need to worry; the file is safe).

A few things to note about the e-version of the Buller book:

1. The original copy of the book created by Maria and Sara was scanned, then run through optical character recognition (OCR) software, so it is generally searchable. That is, you can search for your own name or the name of any family member you want.

2. Some of the pages have been updated already (see, e.g., 23 and 49). Other pages will be updated as I am provided information and my schedule permits.

3. In addition, hyperlinks have been inserted to help you navigate from page to page. So, for example, if you click on “Peter D Buller” on page 13, you will be taken to his dedicated page later in the book (16). If you click on “Peter P Buller” on page 16, you will be taken to his dedicated page (23). Clicking on “Cornelius P Buller” on 23 will take you to his page on 49, and so on.

Hyperlinks can also take you backward. If you forget who was Grandpa Chris’s father, click on “Cornelius P ‘Chris’ Buller” at the top of page 49, and you will be taken back to Peter P’s page (23).

The goal is eventually to hyperlink all the names in the book, so that navigation is as easy and clear as possible.

4. Another feature of the book is the addition of genealogical or background information, maps, and photographs. For example, the David Buller page (13) contains information on the name of David’s father (unverified) and the place of David’s birth. Further on, page 24 supplements Maria and Sara’s account of Peter P with a map of the Molotschna Mennonite Colony. Pages 25–28 extend the story further by offering a illustrated discussion of where Peter D first settled west of Henderson. The description of the Mennonite Cemetery on page 30 is enriched with several photographs and URLs where you can read more about the cemetery.

The next steps will be to update the pages for generations 5 and 6, family by family. After that, generations 7 and 8 will follow. Please do send any information that will enable me to complete your family’s pages. You can email me at [my last name].[my three-letter first name]@gmail.com. I will change the date at the top of this post every time a new file has been uploaded.

Alexanderkrone windmill

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.

Mennonite barn

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.