Benjamin and Helena Buller

The previous post only began to scratch the surface of a remarkable discovery: the names of David Buller’s father and mother. You can rest assured that we will explore a variety of questions that arise from this new information and the documentation that contains it. For the moment, however, we need to be clear just exactly what the previous post revealed.

By now many of you are no doubt able to trace our line back from Grandpa Chris to David Buller, so adding in the new information will be relatively simple: Benjamin and Helena were David’s parents. Thus our line now looks like this (moving backward in time):

		Chris || Malinda
		|
		Peter P || Margaretha
		|
		Peter D || Sarah
		|
		David || Helena
		|
		Benjamin || Helena

Since the register was written in 1819 or 1820 and Benjamin was thirty-one at that time, he must have been born in 1788 or 1789; his wife Helena was six years younger, so she was born in 1794 or 1795.

The fact that David’s father was named Benjamin explains why David and Helena gave one of their sons the same name (Benjamin D, who married Anna Reimer and came to the U.S. on the same ship as Peter D. and family!). The name Benjamin appears in the next generation as well, as Peter P and Margaretha’s second-born son (Grandpa Chris’s older brother).

Not to be lost in the excitement of the discovery of David’s parents is the fact that we now know a great deal more about David’s wife Helena as well. For example, her father was named Jacob Zielke, and her mother was Maria. Helena’s father was born circa 1785, her mother around 1773. We also know that Helena Zielke was, in 1819 or 1820, the fifth child in her family. Finally, and perhaps most important, we now know that Helena was about a year younger than David, so she was born in 1818 or 1819.

Now that we have the basic facts of David’s and Helena’s parents in place, we are ready to explore further the list that records their names and location. As mentioned previously, Richard D. Thiessen has made the list publicly available here. You may want to bookmark or download the file; we will be referring to it frequently over the course of the next posts.