Matrilocality … and Bullers 3b

We know that, upon marrying Margaretha Epp, our ancestor Peter P Buller immediately moved to her family farm, a clear instance of matrilocality. We wondered what could possibly have prompted him to do this, given the fact that his own family, the children of Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller, already farmed a quarter section (160 acres). Although we may never know the precise reason for Peter and Margaretha’s decision to live with her parents, doing so must have seemed more promising to them than casting their lot with his parents—if that was even an option.

This raises the question of why Margaretha, the eleventh child born to Cornelius and Katharina Epp, was so fortunate as to have the opportunity to take over or acquire the family farm. As before, we cannot know for certain, but we do gain some interesting insight in our investigation of this mystery.

Why was Margaretha able to acquire the Epp farm?

We should start with some basic facts:

1. Both of Margaretha’s parents were still living when she married Peter P in early 1890. Her father Cornelius Epp died four years later, on 3 November 1894; her mother Katharina Tieszen Epp less than two years after that, on 2 March 1896. Both are buried in the Buller (Mennonite) cemetery just to the south of their farm, where so many of are family also have been laid to rest. We note that both parents were living at the time of Peter and Margaretha’s marriage simply to make the point that there was no lack of parental ownership of the farm. Peter and Margaretha moved in with her parents, or so it seems; they did not replace them.

2. As mentioned several times, Margaretha was the eleventh child born to Cornelius and Katharina (they had thirteen children total); also worth noting is that probably six of Margaretha’s siblings had already died when she married Peter. We know that three died in Russia, and at least two (possibly three) died in the U.S. before Margaretha married Peter in 1890 (the children who died were Gerhard, Cornelius I, Katharina, Elizabeth, Anna, and probably David). Counting Margaretha, this left seven children of Cornelius and Katharina who could have laid claim to the Epp family farm.

3. The oldest son, Heinrich, was one of the original settlers of the Henderson area, so he had a farm before anyone else in his family. His story is worth recounting in a bit more detail. Heinrich married Sarah Friesen back in Molotschsna colony, and they and their son Cornelius were among the first Mennonite groups to arrive in the U.S. (in New York on the S.S. Teutonia, 3 September 1874). To be clear, Heinrich arrived in the U.S. three years before his parents and other unmarried siblings. That Heinrich immediately secured a farm is evident on the map below, which shows the locations of the farms of the first Mennonite settlers. In the section northwest of the red arrow (which points to the location of Henderson), the name Henry C Epp is written in the northwest quarter, which is the same person as Heinrich, Margaretha’s older brother. (Section 11 in the lower right corner of the map was to become home to the rest of the Cornelius and Katharina Epp family three years later, in 1877; in the lower left corner, section 12 became home to Peter D and Sarah two years after that.)

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Not to pursue a rabbit trail too far, but Smith’s The Coming of the Russian Mennonites may confuse or conflate Henry C Epp and the Reverend Henry H Epp, who emigrated to the U.S. on the same voyage as Henry C and who also settled near Henderson. If you look closely, you can make out “Rev Henry Epp” in the lower panel, the east half of section 9. This is a minor matter, but those who read Smith’s book should keep in mind that the reference to “Rev. Heinrich Epp, of Elizabethal” as one of Henderson’s founding families is to the Reverend Henry Epp who lived south of Henderson (1927, 1974). The following photo of “Heinrich Epp, Founder of the Henderson, Neb.. Colony,” is perhaps of Henry C Epp (Margaretha’s brother), who lived north of Henderson. Reverend Henry was in his mid-fifties when he arrived in the U.S., with a total of four children (some foster), the youngest of whom was seven. Henry C was in his mid-twenties and had a two-and-a-half-year-old son upon arriving, with a second son born a year later. Given the number and ages of the children in the photo, it seems possible that the photograph is of Henry C Epp than of Reverend Henry Epp.

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The point we do not want to miss in all that is that Heinrich was already established on his own farm, so he would not have felt any need to acquire his parents’ farm.

4. Margaretha’s two living older sisters married before she did, both to a son of Johann and Katharina Siebert, the parents of our own ancestor Sarah Siebert Buller. Elisabeth married Johann J Siebert, and Maria married his younger brother Kornelius. We do not know for certain that both brothers had their own land, although a 1911 plat map shows Cornelius Epp as owner of the quarter to the southwest of the Epp/Peter P farm. One would think that the older Johann J Siebert (the son) also had his own farm, but I cannot verify that.

5. This leaves brothers Cornelius, Peter, and Nicolas (Claus) Epp as Margaretha’s remaining siblings who might have taken over the family farm. Cornelius married in 1880, ten years before Margaretha; where he lived or what he did before his death in the Henderson area in 1918 I do not know.

Peter and Claus take us down a different rabbit trail. At some point they both left the Henderson area for new territory. According to the Grandma database, Claus married nine months after Margaretha, remained in the Henderson area for five years, then “migrated to a homestead in the Schmidtsberg area south of Waldheim, (N.W.T.) Saskatchewan. In 1902 they moved to the Carsen School district northwest of Hepburn, Saskatchewan and a few years later to Langham, Saskatchewan, where Claus died.” For Peter, Grandma reports that he was married six years before Margaretha and that he died in Langham, Saskatchewan, on 31 August 1935. Interestingly, Cornelius’s widow also died in Langham; clearly, a number of the Epp family ended up there (on Langham, Saskatchewan, see further here).

What, if any, relation there might be between the move to Canada and possession of the Epp farm is a big question. Perhaps her parents favored Margaretha and wanted her and Peter to move in with them and eventually take over the farm. If so, Peter and Claus may have left for other locales because they could see that there was no available land in the Henderson area. Or, perhaps the timing was simply wrong when Cornelius and Peter married (his parents were not ready to think of turning over the farm to anyone at that point) but right when Margaretha and Peter P married.

Whatever the explanation for why Margaretha, of the four most likely candidates to take over the Epp farm, was the one who did so, we can draw two important conclusions. First, it was not assumed, as we might have thought previously, that control of the farm would be given to a son; in this case three sons were apparently passed over (for whatever reason) as the land was made available to a daughter. Second, this arrangement required a matrilocal marriage, as Peter P left his family and joined both his wife and her parents on the farm that they had settled when they first emigrated to the U.S.

Looking ahead, this was not the last instance of a Buller adopting a matrilocal practice. At least one more remains to be mentioned, and other related practices have yet to be explored.

Source Cited

Smith, C. Henry. 1927. The Coming of the Russian Mennonites: An Episode in the Settling of the Last Frontier, 1874–1884. Berne, IN. : Mennonite Book Concern. Available online here.