A scan is worth a thousand words

As mentioned earlier, Bullers were found in several cities, towns, and villages in the Polish province of Royal Prussia. One such locale with Buller residents was the city of Danzig, modern-day Gdańsk. Various records from the Danzig church are available online, courtesy of Bethel College’s Mennonite Library and Archives (for a full listing, see here).

One such resource is a book recording all baptisms performed between the years 1667 and 1800. On page 16 of that book one finds, for example, the church’s baptismal records for 1713–1715. The most complete entries offer the name of the person baptized, his or her father’s name, the baptized person’s relation to the father (i.e., son or daughter), and any special comments. Most of the entries, however, provide only the name of the person baptized.

What makes page 16 particularly interesting for us is that within the space of five lines we can see with our own eyes the spellings Buhler (no umlaut!) and Buller, as shown in the extract below. The first full name is Abraham Buhler; the last full name shown is Hans Buller.

Note first that the h in Abraham looks like the third letter in Buhler, which confirms that Buhler is the correct reading of the last name. Further, the two instances of the letter l in Buller are identical to the l after the h in Buller, which reinforces the conclusion that the two last names are spelled differently. One final observation: the u in both names has the same mark above it that we have seen before (see here)—we really need to figure out what that mark means!

What are we to make of this simultaneous appearance of Buhler and Buller? Is it significant that the first name is spelled Buhler rather than Bühler? Are these individuals from related “Buller” lines, or are they unrelated? In all likelihood, the person recording the names did not decide to spell one name one way and the other name another way, so if these individuals are related at some point in the past, how did the names come to be spelled differently? So many questions, so few answers … at least for now.