1. We discovered that Benjamin 2’s father was also named Benjamin from a list of 1839 Waldheim settlers that identified him as Benjamin Benjamin (here). The middle name reflects his father’s first name.
2. We learned earlier (here) that Benjamin 2 was married to a woman named Helena; her last name remains unknown to us. Born around 1793, she was four years Benjamin’s junior.
Most of the new information we have discovered relates to Benjamin 2 and Helena’s children. The following diagram presents what we know in a compact manner. (For a large-size version of the diagram, see here.)
3. Benjamin 2 and Helena’s firstborn child and son was named Benjmain (after his father and grandfather, so Benjamin 3 in our labeling). He had been identified as Dominic when we first encountered him in Wysock (here), but the list of 1840 Waldheim settlers (here) and a record of Mennonites who planted crops in 1839 (here) demonstrate conclusively that his name was Benjamin.
Benjamin 3 was born around 1816 and was likely married by 1840, when he received an allotment of land in Waldheim. From the 1845 list of those Mennonites who returned to Volhynia and those who stayed in Waldheim (see here; Benjamin 3 was in the latter group) we learn that Benjamin 3 and his wife had a son and three daughters. At present we do not know anything more.
4. Benjamin 2 and Helena’s second son was our ancestor David Buller. He married Helena Zielke, as we already knew, but we can now suggest with more confidence that Helena was born in 1819. If so, she was a year younger than David.
According to an 1850 Heinrichsdorf census (here and here), David and Helena’s first three children were Helena, Peter D, and Elisabeth. We already knew that from the Buller Family Record, but the census confirms that the BFR order of birth is correct (contra the GRANDMA database). The 1850 census also permits us to supply Helena’s approximate year of birth (1844), a fact that is missing in the BFR.
5. The next child of Benjamin 2 and Helena listed is another son: Heinrich. One wonders if he really was the next child born or if there was another between David and Heinrich. One might imagine that a daughter was born between the two boys and that by 1850 she was married and living with her own husband; this would explain her absence from the Buller family list in 1850. Of course, all that is no more than a possibility, an appealing theory to explain a five-year gap between children.
What we do know is that Heinrich was born around 1823 and that by 1850 he was married; his wife, born in 1819 and thus four years his senior, was named Anna. Heinrich and Anna had two children, both daughters: Helena (the same name as her grandmother Helena, wife of Benjamin 2) and Maria. The girls were four and two in 1850.
6. Benjamin 2 and Helena’s fourth and last son mentioned is Peter: seventeen years old in 1850, so born around 1833. Not surprisingly, the census lists no wife or children for him. Clearly, he was still unmarried and living at home.
By 1850, Benjamin 2 and Helena had four sons (possibly also one or more daughters) and at least nine grandchildren (more, if any daughters also had children). All told, Benjamin and Helena’s family included at least eighteen members, probably more. Twelve of the family lived with Benjamin and Helena in Heinrichsdorf; the other six (their oldest son Benjamin and his family) were roughly 400 miles to the south, in Waldheim.
In 1850, Benjamin 2 was sixty-one years old. His life had begun in Prussia/Poland, probably in the Schwetz area along the Vistula River. When he was twenty-eight, he and Helena and family journeyed 360 miles southeast to the province of Volhynia. A little more than two decades later Benjamin led his family 500 miles farther southeast to Molotschna colony, where he received a land allotment in 1839. For some reason Benjamin and other recent settlers found life in Waldheim to be intolerable, so in 1845 they moved 400 miles northwest to another part of Volhynia. In all likelihood, Benjamin 2 and Helena died there.
I recite that brief history again to call attention to the extent of Benjamin’s journeying. He moved his family and entire household at least 1,260 miles in less than forty years (1817–1845). Given the slow rate of travel of that time (by wagon or cart), Benjamin, Helena, and family must have spent months of their lives on the road from one place to another.
Why did Benjamin move so often and so far? Obviously we cannot know, but I would like to think that he was ever in search of a better life for his family and for himself. It seems that many Bullers (and other Mennonites) moved from one home to another far more than one might expect. In retrospect, that was a good thing, since it led our ancestors from wherever we originated to Poland to Volhynia to Molotschna and eventually to Nebraska, where our clan finally managed to settle down.
But we are jumping too far ahead in the story. First we need to learn more about Heinrichsdorf, the village in Volhynia that Benjamin and other Mennonites from Waldheim established. After that, we will explore a particular primary source that provides further information about both our immediate and more distant family.
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