His name was Benjamin

Russian State Historical Archives in St. Petersburg

Several days ago Richard D. Thiessen posted a document online that Mennonite historian and genealogist Glenn Penner had earlier alerted me to with the comment, “I think you’ll find this interesting,” an understatement if ever there was one. The document is a translation of a file housed in the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (Russian State Historical Archives).

The English translation has been given the title “Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820.” The words Mennonites and Volhynia stand out as having special relevance for us Bullers and leave little doubt that this is a trail worth following.

The register was compiled, as indicated by the title, around 1819–1820 (certainty on the date eludes us), so roughly sixteen years before some Volhynian Mennonites began packing up their belongings to move and found the village of Waldheim in Molotschna colony. The register lists, according to the title, the names of some Mennonites who lived in the Rovno district. As indicated in the earlier post on the geography of Volhynia (see here), this district was in the center-north part of the region.

The document records, according to translator Sergei Chaiderman’s précis, “the religious background of the Mennonites; the number of people, both male and female, if they have signed a contract with the landowner; the amount they pay for the rent to the landowner and the amount of taxes they pay to the government fund.”

As seen in the scan below (provided by Glenn Penner), the register is laid out family by family, with the male head of household and his age given first, followed (usually) by his wife and her age, and then male children with their ages, female children and their ages, and other members of the household (e.g., mother-in-law, nephew).

So, for example, without even knowing the names of family 1 below, we can deduce that the husband was thirty-three and his wife forty-seven (presumably not her first marriage), and the family included a son aged seven and three daughters, ages sixteen, nine, and one. Family 2 included a fifty-three-year-old husband, a thirty-year-old wife, and a two-year-old child. The register continues in the same general pattern through eighteen different families, ninety people in all.

The register is composed in Russian (not surprisingly) in a cursive form of the Cyrillic/Russian alphabet. Some of the letters are recognizable to English speakers, such as the D under the top arrow and the A under the bottom arrow. In fact, I suspect that most readers can make out the name of the nine-year-old girl in family 1. However, most of the letters in the list are difficult, if not impossible, for anyone not experienced with Russian handwriting to decipher.

Given the differences between some letters of our Latin alphabet and corresponding ones in the Cyrillic alphabet, it would not be unusual for English speakers to stare at their own family name for several minutes without even realizing it—which is exactly what we have been doing. In fact, the surname of family 2 is Buller. Without going too deep into the weeds, let’s explore this a little further.

Before we do so, however, we must remind ourselves that in 1819 there was no correct or authorized spelling of the Buller name. It could be spelled however it sounded to the person writing, in this case presumably a Russian government official charged with keeping track of immigrants and especially of the amount of taxes they might owe.

Leaving aside the first name (which is Andrei or Andrey = Andreas), we will focus our attention on the second. Although we might expect to see a character resembling B (for Buller) at the beginning, the Cyrillic В-looking character corresponds to our v; in Cyrillic, what we think of as B/b is represented by Б, which is evident in the cursive form above.

The у character that follows is our u (like upsilon in Greek), and the tiny loop after that is an e. Thus far we have Bue-.

The letter l seems fairly evident, as does the tiny loop of an e that follows. But what about all the extra marks at the end?

Notice that both the first and last names have the same letter with a long descender, as we have with our letter p. As in Greek, that letter form in Cyrillic stands for our letter r. The final cluster that is set apart from the r is, as far as I can tell, the archaic letter ъ (yer), a sign used to indicate that the preceding consonant is hard; since it has no phonological value, it is not transcribed.

Putting this all together, we read the surname Bueler (or Russian Буелер) for family 2, Buller in our current spelling. Amazing as it is to see our family name on a Russian archival document from the early nineteenth century, that isn’t even the best part.

As noted above, Richard D. Thiessen has posted the entire register online for everyone to consult, available here. At the bottom of the first page (family 5) one encounters the Jacob Tzlivk family. I am told that Tzlivk is a variant spelling of what we know as Zielke (remember that the person recording the name simply wrote what he heard). Reading down through the list of names one sees Jacob and Maria followed by their five children: Johan, Friedrich, Maria, Katherina, and Helena.

Helena? Yes, Helena Zielke, age one in 1819–1820. Let that sink in for a moment. Here we have the earliest record of a direct ancestor, the future mother of Peter D Buller and his many descendants. Helena Zielke was in Volhynia, and according to the register her family had been there since 1811, which means that Volhynia is where Helena was born.

Remarkable as it is to see Helena (spelled Elena) recorded, that is not the end of it. Family 18 is also of interest to us. The surname Bueler should, I trust, be recognizable, even though the top of the letter l has been omitted or erased.

The focus of our attention is on the first-listed son, the one that begins with the letter D, followed by the Cyrillic equivalents of a, v, i, and d (with a soft sign yeri at the end, I believe). This David Buller was two years old when the register was taken, so that would place his date of birth in 1817 or 1818. To the best of our knowledge, this was precisely the time period during which our David, the father of Peter D, was born.

Given the convergence of evidence—the fact that David lived in Waldheim and thus was likely a resident of Volhynia before that, the fact that Helena Zielke and this David Buller are located in the same village in Volhynia, which would explain how our Helena and David met and married, and the fact that the date of birth for the David on the register is the same as David our ancestor—there really can be no doubt: this David is our David at two years old living in the Rovno district of Volhynia.

Because we (actually, Richard D. Thiessen and Glenn Penner) have found David, we now know the name of David’s father: his name was Benjamin. We also know the name of David’s mother: Helena, just like David’s later wife. There is more to explore here and across Volhynia in general. I think this is enough for today.


Source

Chaiderman, Sergei, trans. 1997. Register of Mennonites in Rovno Region, Volhynia, 1819–1820. Posted by Richard D. Thiessen on the Mennonite Genealogy website. Available online here.