Benjamin Buller 13

Although we will return to the 1840 list of settlers indirectly, as a matter of comparison with other records, for now we move on to the fifth primary source provided by Glenn Penner and Steve Fast (for the complete list and links to all the documents, see here).

By way of recap, we began with the 1833 list of Mennonites who wanted to leave Volhynia for the more promising fields of Molotschna colony (here, here,  here, here, and especially here). After that we explored a list of Waldheim settlers who were assigned a Wirtschaft in 1839 (here, here, here, and here), followed by a similar list for 1840 (here, here, and here).

In this post we turn to a new record that is apparently independent of the prior records but covers the same time and place: “Mennonites Assigned Wirtschaften in Waldheim in 1839–1841” (extracted by Glenn Penner; see here). The document is relatively simple: it lists thirty of Waldheim’s first settlers from the years 1839 through 1841. For ease of reference, I reproduce the entire list below:

Surname	First Name	Wirtschaft Number	Year Settled
Schultz	Tobias	1	1841
Beier	Martin	2	1840
Dirks	Heinrich	3	1839
Wedel	Cornelius	4	1839
Voth	Heinrich	5	1840
Schmidt	Peter	6	1839
Dirks	Tobias	7	1839
Pankratz	Peter	9	1839
Wedel	Cornelius	10	1840
Wedel	Cornelius	15	1840
Schmidt	Peter	17	1840
Pankratz	Jacob	18	1840
Sperling	Heinrich	19	1840
Nachtigal	David	20	1840
Wedel	Johann	21	1840
Nachtigal	Andreas	22	1840
Richert	Jacob	23	1840
Klassen	Jacob	24	1840
Koehn	David	25	1840
Buller	Benjamin	26	1840
Dirks	David	32	1840
Koehn	David	33	1840
Ewert	Johann (Sr.)	34	1840
Schmidt	Johann	35	1840
Buller	Benjamin	36	1840
Boese	Samuel	37	1840
Unruh	Cornelius	38	1840
Buller	Jacob	39	1840
Wedel	Heinrich	40	1840
Wedel	Benjamin	31	1840

For the moment, our main interest is in our immediate family members. We do not know who Jacob Buller, owner of Wirtschaft 39 was, but the other two Bullers on the list are, of course, Benjmain II and Benjamin III. It is impossible to determine, based on the information given, which Wirtschaft was assigned to father and which to son. All we can say is that our family owned Wirtschaften 26 and 36 by the end of 1841.

But look at the two Benjamin Buller entries again. Both Benjamins are said to have settled in 1840. However, we know better. Benjamin II settled in 1839, the year before his son received his land. This observation is important, since it highlights a problem with this record: many of the settlement years appear to be inaccurate.

We will return to that issue in the next post, but for now we close with the observation that none of the original eight 1838 settlers is listed. One wonders why the list begins with the second wave of settlers, the 1839 ones, and why only thirty settlers are listed in this record. We will keep in mind all of these questions when we return to this record in the following post.


Source

Mennonites Assigned Wirtschaften in Waldheim in 1839–1841. Peter J. Braun Archives, File 738. Extracted by Glenn Penner. Available online here.