George Buller in 1695

I have been reflecting recently about the fact that in 1695 a George Buller lived in Schönsee, a village roughly 10 miles northeast of and across the Vistula River from the Przechowka church in Poland (or Prussia). What significance might this have for our own direct ancestors? We have found quite a number of Bullers in Neumark and Deutsch-Wymysle (to which we will return shortly), but thus far we have been unable to identify any who seem to be our own direct ancestors.

Thinking that 1695 George would be an interesting topic for a post, I searched the blog to find where I had written about it previously—only to discover that there is no such post. Oops! So, let us start from the beginning: according to Herbert Wiebe (1952, 81), records for the village of Schönsee list (a) George Buller (among other Mennonites) as a landowner in 1695. The scan below reproduces the page from Wiebe listing George.

A few comments: (1) the term Einsassen identifies George as a landowner as understood within the context of that time and place: he held a long-term lease to a particular plot of land that was owned by Polish nobility, the crown, or possibly the village or even the Church; (2) many of the names we see on that list are familiar from Przechowka and the other churches: Unrau, Voth, Köhn, Sperling (Siefert/Sievert also is intriguing); (3) the appearance of the same names across several years (e.g., Peter Siefert/Sievert, Ferdinand/us Hube, Hans Voth/Vott, Stephan/Steffen Funck, Andres/Andreas Decker) implies that this is a residency list or census, not a record of leases written in a given year (since leases were generally written for a forty-year period); (4) Wiebe cites his source, the Danzig Riechsarchiv, Schönsee Nachbarbuch (358, 845), so his information is presumably reliable.

Who was this George Buller? The simplest answer would be that he was the George married to Dina Thoms, the earliest ancestral couple of all the Bullers we know thus far. In fact, the Buller chart to which we have referred from time to time assumes that identification by listing “in Schönsee 1695” under George’s name (probably the reason I thought I had written about it).

Was Schönsee George the same person as George husband of Dina Thoms? We cannot be certain, but given the fact that Schönsee was relatively close to the Schwetz/Przechowka area (10 miles), and considering also the fact that the time frame matches (George and Dina were in this area in the late 1600s–early 1700s), the most logical conclusion would be to identify the two: 1695 Schönsee George was Przechowka George the husband of Dina Thoms.

If this is so, then we need to spend some time thinking through the possible implications of George living in Schönsee in 1695. Why might this be significant for our ancestors? We will return to that question in the near future, but first we must consider two further pieces of evidence about George Buller of Schönsee, husband of Dina—and before we do that (not wanting to stray too far) we will finish us the last Buller records from Deutsch-Wymysle. Stay tuned!

Source Cited

Wiebe, Herbert. 1952. Das Siedlungswerk niederländischer Mennoniten im Weichseltal zwischen Fordon und Weissenberg bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Ost-Mitteleuropas 3. Marburg: Johann Gottfried Herder-Institut.