More on the surname Buller

A recent post explored the spelling—and pronunciation—of our family name based on the church registers from Przechovka, West Prussia, and Alexanderwohl, Molotschna colony. The Grandma database offers another perspective on our family name.

The acronymn Grandma stands for Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry. This resource, developed by the Genealogy Project Committee of the California Mennonite Historical Society, contains “a genealogical database of people whose ancestral lines include Mennonites or Hutterites who at some time lived in Poland, Ukraine, or Russia.” As of November 2014, Grandma listed 1,318,127 individuals of Mennonite heritage.

The Grandma database allows users to search in a variety of ways: first name + last name, last name only, or relationship (parent–child or husband–wife). It also allows users to search for exact matches (e.g., search only for Anna Buller, not Ann Buller) or for all known spelling variations.

For example, a search to identify all the Bullers regardless of how the name is spelled in Grandma returns 5,795 records. The list of names returned by the search also reveals all the spellings of our name that Grandma’s developers regard as a possible variant of Buller (see below).

The most common spelling is, as expected, Buller, with 3,457 of the 5,795 total (59.6 percent). Not terribly far behind is Buhler, with 2,240 (38.7 percent). Other names account for the final 1.7 percent of listings:

• Buehler: 47
• Bollee: 24
• Boehler: 15
• Boller: 9
• Buler: 3
• Boler: 2

Interestingly, there is only a single instance of Büller with an umlaut in the Grandma database, and it is not associated with our family name.

In light of the data, one wonders: Given what we know about the the fluidity of spelling in ancient times, are Buller and Buhler acceptable variants of the surname for the same general family group? Or, might Buller and Buhler point to some sort of difference in origin? To ask the question slightly differently, do all Mennonites with the name Buller or Buhler ultimately derive from the same area, or might one family group have originated in one region (say, Holland) and the other family group in another region (maybe Germany)? I know of no way to answer this question, but it seems to me a possibility that would explain this particular spelling variation.

One thing we can know from this short excursion is that the spelling Buller without an umlaut is the standard one. Thus, the Mennonite Encyclopedia entry that lists Büller as a common variant should be called into question. The data simply do not support such an assertion.