Monday, May 2, 2016

More Neumark Bullers?

The previous post about Neumark Mennonites accidentally omitted one important element: a map showing Neumark’s location relative to the Schwetz-area Przechowka church with which many of our distant ancestors were associated. This post begins by correcting that error.


The star on the right (east) is the Schwetz area; the Mennonite villages of Brenkenhoffswalde and Franztal are the two stars 120 miles west-southwest.

Another location that we must keep in mind is the region of Volhynia. The map below thus broadens our perspective so that we see the relation between Neumark on the far west, Schwetz/Przechowka in the center (along the Vistula River), and the village of Zofyovka in the Rovno district of Volhynia. All three locations are important to this post.


If you recall, earlier we discovered that the twenty-one families who founded the village of Zofyovka just north of Wysock, in the Rovno district of Volhynia, included two Buller families, led by Heinrich and David (see here).

At that time we were unable to say much at all about these families, such as where they lived before moving to Zofyovka in 1811. But perhaps now, with the Buller chart developed by Glenn Penner, we will be able to offer a reasonable suggestion. (For a full-sized version of the chart, see here.)


Because we do not know how old Heinrich and David Buller were when they emigrated to Volhynia, we must work in the realm of possibilities and probabilities.

The two were, obviously, old enough to sign a contract and almost certainly had their own families (as other signatories to the contract did), so they must have been at least twenty years of age. That would place their year of birth in 1791 at the latest. One might imagine them as old fifty (older men could have gone into untamed areas, but it seems less likely), which would make their earliest year of birth 1761. Somewhere between 1761 and 1791, then, we would expect Heinrich and David to have been born.

We have fairly complete records for the line of George 3XXXX, and none of the Heinrichs listed there is a match: Heinrich 378 (generation 4) died in 1795, and Heinrich 393 (generation 5, so not shown in the chart) moved directly from Schwetz to Alexanderwohl in Molotschna in the year 1820. There are no Davids in this line during the period 1761–1791. In light of this, we can reasonably conclude that Heinrich and David were not part of the George 3XXXX line.

What about the Peter 354 line? As mentioned several times earlier, this Buller line was associated with the village of Jeziorka in the Schwetz area the latter half of the eighteenth century. However, in 1803 some family members emigrated to Volhynia. The only known David in this line (our records are admittedly incomplete for this line) was part of the 1803 migration, so he could not have been the David who emigrated to Zofyovka in Volynia in 1811. That there are no known Heinrichs in this line simply tilts the scales further to the conclusion that the David and Heinrich Buller who are the object of our study were probably not members of this family line.

That leaves the family line of Hans 340. Interestingly, the far left part of that line (column A) shows two brothers named Heinrich and David. As tempting as it is to suggest that these are the very Bullers listed on the 1811 contract between nobleman Waclav Borejko and twenty-one Mennonite families, they probably are not. We do not know when Heinrich 348 and David 346 were born, but a sibling was born in the mid-1730s, so presumably they were born during the same general time frame.

It is worth noting, however, that our earlier post on Buller first names (see here) revealed that the two most common names in the line were Heinrich and David. This suggests further that this is the most likely line from which Heinrich and David of Zofyovka were descended.

In the end, all we can safely conclude is that the Heinrich and David Buller who signed their names to the 1811 contract were likely of Hans 340’s line. Still, even this limited conclusion is important, since  this locates Heinrich and David in Neumark, where most of the Hans 340 line lived. In all likelihood, the two Bullers who helped found the Volhynian village of Zofyovka in 1811 were Neumark Mennonites and thus part of the Mennonite community that we surveyed in the prior post.


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