Partible, bilateral inheritance … and Bullers

In an intriguing chapter titled “‘If Joint Heirs of Grace, How Much More of Temporal Goods?’: Inheritance and Community Formation,” Royden Loewen discusses the community-building effect that traditional Mennonite inheritance practices played among the groups who immigrated to North American in the 1870s. In the process, he identifies two aspects of those practices (and other social realities) and discusses them from a sociological perspective.

Although we should not presume that the precise practices identified were applied uniformly in all Mennonite contexts of every time and place, we can perhaps gain some insight into our own family history by considering what we have previously learned from this sociological angle.

Loewen writes:

Mennonites carried to North America in the 1870s a culture of bilateral partible inheritance. “Partibility” meant that the estates were divided, often literally, into fragmented eighty-, forty-, and even twenty-acre parcels. “Bilaterality” meant that both sexes, girls and boys, inherited land equally. (Loewen 2001, 26)

According to Loewn, bilaterality—treating female and male descendants equally in the distribution of inheritance—reflected the Mennonite desire to obey the implications of 1 Peter 3.7: since husbands and wives were joint-heirs in the grace of spiritual life, they should also be joint heirs with regard to the goods of this life. In other words, both female and male children were to receive the same portion as heirs of a departed parent.

The easiest way to accomplish this, of course, was to divide up the estate and to give each heir an equal “part.” Of course, theory is always easier than actual practice, which is why the Mennonite impulse toward partible, bilateral inheritance took different shapes in different settings.

In Molotschna and Chortitza, for example, Mennonite partible, bilateral inheritance butted up against the Russian prohibition against dividing up a Wirtschaft (farm plot) that a Mennonite had received from the state. The government did not want the originally established plots (65 dessiantines = 176 acres) to be subdivided again and again into ever-smaller pieces, so they allowed the transfer of only the entire plot, not a portion of it. This rule did not apply to land acquired through other means.

To accommodate these restrictions, Russian Mennonites generally liquidated all the belongings of a deceased person, including his or her land holdings, then distributed the revenue generated by the sale equally among all the children. Thus Harvey L. Dyck writes in his introduction to the diaries of Jacob Epp:

Upon the death of a landholder, a child or outsider purchased the undivided property at a family or village auction. The proceeds of such sale were merged with the other assets of an inheritance and distributed equally among the heirs. This combination of indivisible landholdings and equal division of monetized inheritances had the effect of preserving viable agrarian household economies while diffusing wealth broadly within families. (Dyck 1991,  Kindle 1179–82)

It seems that sale to one of the children was preferred, but sale to someone outside of the family was perfectly acceptable in cases when none of the children was able or willing to purchase the land.

Again, what Dyck describes is a tidy theory; in practice, we can see that there was room for give and take and negotiation. Jacob Epp writes in his diary, for example,

20 April 1873
Friday. This morning Julius Friesen of Friesenthal invited me to their place where his father, Diedr. Friesen, wanted my help in dividing up his wife’s estate among the children. I accepted. …After long discussion an agreement was reached providing for the distribution of 900 desiatinas of his 1385 desiatina estate among his nine adult children, that is, 100 desiatinas for each child. The heirs will receive the land this fall, assuming all related obligations. I made a clean copy of the inheritance contract.

21 April 1873
Saturday. When the time came to sign the agreement today, the children expressed reservations. The inventory of the estate showed that half of the assets were not being divided [as Mennonite inheritance practices required]. The children wanted significantly more [than their father was willing to give]. This grieved the aged father who asked me to follow him into an adjoining room where he sought my advice. He was reluctant to distribute more of his property, but also did not want to be unfair. His children feared he might remarry, I pointed out to him, and that his assets would then pass into the hands of strangers. He had no intention of ever remarrying, he replied, and were he to change his mind he would first distribute a part of his assets to his children, ensuring that they received their rightful share. This undertaking was acceptable to all of the children, who now willingly signed the agreement. Then the witnesses signed: Isaac Zacharias and Gerhard Braun of Neuhausen, Jacob Friesen Sr of Friesenthal, and I. Finally, the deceased mother’s clothes were distributed among the children by lot or sold at auction to the highest bidder.  (Dyck 1991,  Kindle 6614–27)

What should not be overlooked is that the death of the wife/mother precipitated this distribution of inheritance. The husband/father did not simply assume sole ownership of the couple’s joint holdings. Half of those holdings—or at least the value of half of those holdings—were to be distributed to the children as heirs of their mother.

Also worthy of note is the negotiation that took place: the inheritance was not distributed according to some rote formula (life is not that neat); the appointed mediators/witnesses negotiated among the parties until a formal agreement could be drawn up and signed.

Further, this Chortitza inheritance was far larger than the typical Wirtschaft: Diedrich Friesen owned 1,385 dessiantines, or circa 3,750 acres. Obviously, there was no problem dividing that estate, since it had not been granted to him by the government. Moreover, each share was still much larger than the “standard” plot of 65 dessiantines.

In spite of these variation, what Epp describes is a clear example of the principle of bilateral, partible inheritance enacted within the limitations of the Russian law. One last aspect of the Epp account is worthy of special note: Diedrich Friesen promised that, if he ever decided to remarry, he would first distribute his assets to his current children. In other words, they would receive their inheritance while he was still living. This may strike some as a bit awkward if not distasteful, but it does open the window to a reality of Mennonite inheritance that we need to explore further, since it may explain some of what we have observed from one of our own ancestors here in the U.S.

Works Cited

Dyck, Harvey L., ed. and trans. 1991. A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp, 1851–1880. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Loewen, Royden. 2001. Hidden Worlds: Revisiting the Mennonite Migrants of the 1870s. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.