Benjamin Buller 20

The previous post identified the male Bullers associated with Benjamin Buller 2 on the 1850 census, including three of his sons—David, Heinrich, and Peter—as well as David’s son Peter D. We turn our attention now to the females in the family.

As before, we are looking at the members of family 22.

1. Listed opposite Benjamin 2 is his wife Helena. An age of fifty-seven in 1850 would place her year of birth sometime around 1793, which corresponds to her being four years younger than her husband.

2. If you recall, David Buller was listed immediately after his father; likewise, David’s wife Helena is listed just after her mother-in-law of the same name. Helena wife of David’s age is given as thirty-one, the same as her husband David. This would imply a year of birth for Helena around 1819. This is consistent of her age being listed as one in the 1819 or 1820 Rovno census (see here). Of course, thus far we have believed that David was born in 1818, so we should be cautious about assigning any definite year to Helena’s birth. It was probably 1819, but we cannot be certain.

3. Next listed are two of “his” (David’s) daughters. We might prefer to say “their daughters” or, since Helena is listed immediately above, “her daughters,” but social conventions were different in the mid-nineteenth century. At any rate, we see here the names Helena and Elisabeth, both of whom appear in the Buller Family Record (only David’s first marriage and children shown).

Helena the daughter’s year of birth is unknown in the BFR, but we can suggest that it was 1843 or 1844, since she was seven at the time of the 1850 census, one year older than her brother Peter D. At the very least this settles the question of who was David and Helena’s firstborn child (see our earlier discussion here): it was clearly Helena, not Heinrich (as GRANDMA has it), who actually was born much later to David and his second wife.

4. Daughter Elisabeth’s age is given as three, which would place her birth around 1847, just as the BFR has it.

5. After David and Helena’s children we encounter Heinrich’s wife Anna (born ca. 1819) and their two daughters Helena (a popular name in the Buller family, probably in honor of Benjamin’s wife) and Maria (born ca. 1846 and ca. 1848, respectively).

All told the Benjamin Buller 2 family included twelve people: seven females and five males. In the 1845 “List of Mennonites Moving from Waldheim back to Volhynia” (see here and here) Benjamin’s family had five males and five females. We can now identify a little more precisely who those people were.

The males were Benjamin, his three sons David, Heinrich, and Peter, and David’s son Peter D. Four of the five females can be identified with certainty: Helena wife of Benjamin, Helena wife of David, Helena daughter of David and Helena, and Anna wife of Heinrich. None of the other females was alive in 1845; the closest was Helena daughter of Heinrich and Anna, but she was only four in 1850 and thus presumably born after the 1845 list. It is possible that one of the Buller females counted on the 1845 listed died before the 1850 census; childhood death was fairly common in that context, so perhaps that is what happened in this case.

We are by no means finished with this primary source, but this is a good place to stop. We know all the names of our immediate family who lived in Heinrichsdorf, Volhynia, in 1850:

• Benjamin and Helena Buller, plus their three sons and their families


• David and Helena Buller and their children: Helena, Peter, and Elisabeth
• Heinrich and Anna Buller and their children: Helena and Maria
• Peter Buller (unmarried)

One final observation: Peter D was counted on the 1845 list of people who wished to leave Waldheim, so we can conclude beyond reasonable doubt that he was born in that Molotschna village during his family’s brief residency there.