Still thinking about George

An earlier post (here) thought imaginatively about how we might piece together what we do know about George Buller, husband of Dina Thoms, into a plausible account that fills in the some of the gaps of what we do not know.

We noticed, for example, that George was likely around forty-five when he held the Schönsee land lease in 1695 (see also here). Based on this, as well as the fact that at least one of George’s children appears to have had a mother different from Dina, we hypothesized that George probably had been married and widowed before he married Dina. If so, he also presumably had other children whose names do not appear in the Przechowka church book because they did not move when George and Dina and family 2 did but rather stayed in Schönsee.

This would explain, to my mind, how our particular family might be descended from George (as I think we are) but have no direct connection to Przechowka or its church book (which accords well with the results of our genealogical searches thus far). To state the hypothesis succinctly: our family descended from George Buller of the Schwetz area, specifically from one of his older sons who were not part of the Przechowka church with which George, Dina, and their family were associated. It will be helpful to unpack this hypothesis a little further.

One might wonder why George’s son who was our ancestor was not part of the Przechowka church: Was he a lapsed Mennonite or some sort of reprobate, possibly even a … Lutheran?! Probably not. In fact, Schönsee at that time had two Mennonite churches. The Old Flemish church was technically a part of the Przechowka congregation, although it had its own preachers and meetings. Schönsee also had a Frisian Mennonite church at this time, which met in “die grosse Schule” (large school) (Nanne van der Zijpp and Richard D. Thiessen 2012).

These two groups within the broader Mennonite church typically did not associate with one another (the Old Flemish were quite conservative; the Frisians were not), but Mennonite researcher Manuel Janz alerts me to the fact sometimes people did go from one Mennonite branch to the other. In fact, he notes that in Przechowka the Cornels, the Dircks, Funcks, and Andreas Unrau’s first wife came “von die andere Kandt” (from the other side; see the underlined words below). By way of contrast, Thomas Funck, Trincke Isaac, and all the children of Hans Sparling went to the other side.

This raises several intriguing possibilities (all still in the realm of hypothesis, nothing more). George and his first family may have been part of the Schönsee Frisian church, but he became part of the Old Flemish Przechowka church around the time of his marriage to Dina, whose family roots were in that church. If so, then George’s first family probably stayed in the Schönsee Frisian church when he and Dina moved near Przechowka, which explains family 1’s absence from the Przechowka church book. The primary weakness with this hypothesis is that the church book does not identify George as one who came “von die andere Kandt” (as far as we can tell). That is not necessarily a decisive factor, but it should at least be taken into consideration.

The other possibility that comes to mind is that some sort of family unrest developed between the members of George’s first family, many of whom were adults, and his second family whom Dina bore. Perhaps George had been a member of the Old Flemish Przechowka church all along and his children of the first family were the ones who left that church to join the Schönsee Frisian church. This imagined scenario seems a little less likely than the first one, but either explanation is possible, as well as other explanations that have not yet come to mind.

One intriguing bit of evidence may tilt us in the direction of the first explanation: the record of land leases that we consulted earlier (here).

If one finds George Buller on the 1695 list, then moves horizontally to the 1705 list, one is able to identify the person who owned the lease that George had previously held: Jacob Tomasche. Again, Manuel Janz helps us understand the significance of this: the -sche ending on the name identifies the name as a female head of household, most likely a widow (Manuel points to several websites that demonstrate this, including Glenn Penner’s statement of the meaning of the ending here).

So, the person who held the lease to George Buller’s land in 1705 was the widow of Jacob Tomas, or Jacob Thoms. Given the flexible orthography of that time, we can safely equate Tomas with Thoms; beyond that we can reasonably assume that this person was one of the four relatives of Dina Thoms named Jacob listed in the Przechowka church book.

Given what we do know, it seems highly likely that one of the Thoms family assumed the lease after George decided that he was finished farming. To put the matter differently, none of George’s Buller sons took over that lease. George’s close ties with the Thoms family, evidenced by the fact that his lease was transferred to one of them, would be consistent with him transferring his loyalty from the Frisian church to Dina’s Old Flemish one, and so it may tilt us in the direction of the first possibility discussed above.

In the end, we know only a few facts and should be careful not to confuse our plausible explanations with what we can demonstrate based on evidence. That being said, the scenario outlined above would fill in a number of gaps and make reasonable sense of the facts that we do know, so we can consider it a reasonable possibility subject to modification as we learn more about our family’s origins.

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To read more about the Old Flemish, see the GAMEO article here. For more on the Frisian branch of the church, see here. C. Henry Smith (1920) offers a helpful description of these and other parties in the Mennonite movement.

[The Old Flemish] were exceedingly strict disciplinarians and were similar in many respects to the Old Order Amish in America today. They made free use of the Ban and shunned all those excommunicated, carrying marital avoidance to extreme length. The practise of shunning …demanded that all intercourse, social and business relations as well as religious fellowship, be severed with one who was excommunicated, and among the stricter sects this was extended to the marital relations as well. The Old Flemish practised feetwashing, but only among elders when visiting from a distance. They wore hooks and eyes on their clothes, and shoestrings instead of buckles. They wore long beards and insisted upon peculiar cuts of clothing. Some practised immersion and were called “dompelaars”. Silent prayer was customary. They were quite literal in their interpretation of the Bible, some insisting on observing the Lord’s Supper in the evening.

At the liberal end were the Waterlanders, so-called because originally they came from the southern end of Holland, a region called Waterland. These were exceedingly sparing in their use of the Ban, insisted on no set Confession of Faith, and had few set rules regulating their belief and practise. …

Between these two extremes were the Frisians and Upper Germans. The former as the name implies were the churches of Friesland, who refused at first to fellowship with the Flemish immigrants. There were two wings of these also. The “Young” or “Loose” Frisians approached the Waterlanders in their religious policy. The Upper Germans had come into Netherlands as refugees from Upper Germany.

Sources Cited

Smith, C. Henry. 1920. The Mennonites: A Brief History of Their Origin and Later Development in Both Europe and America. Berne, IN: Mennonite Book Concern. Available for reading online or download here.

Zijpp, Nanne van der and Richard D. Thiessen. Schönsee (Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.