Benjamin Buller 22

Now that we have learned all that we can about Heinrichsdorf the village, we are ready to circle back around and explore the congregation’s church book.

The front cover of the church book has the year 1858 written on it, which one would think is the year when the records were assembled, or at least the process of compiling the church book was begun. That being said, we should not ignore the fact that the brief church and village history at the front of the book records an event as late as 5 September 1861. Mention of that event does not require us to conclude that the book was not started until after that; however, it should warn us against thinking that the book was completed in one fell swoop in the year 1858.

Obviously, our primary interest in the book is for what it reveals about our own family. In fact, there are several pages devoted to our Bullers. We will examine them all as we piece together new details about our family into a fuller picture than we have had thus far.

Just as we saw in the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census, males are listed together on the left, females all together on the right. We begin with our family’s first left-hand page, with the male Bullers.

The thumbnail to the right provides a useful overview of the setup of each page, with columns clearly marked by headings at the top and lines down the page. We will look at the columns more closely in a moment; for now it is enough to note that the narrow one on the left contains numbers, followed by the widest column for the person’s name; after the name are four columns of equal width: one for the date of birth, one for the date of baptism, one for the date of marriage, and one for the date of death.

One obvious difference between this church book and the one from Przechowka (see, e.g., here) is the unused space on this one. The Przechowka church book did not use only the tops of pages; the entire page from top to bottom was filled with names and as many dates as were available. A less obvious difference between the two is the basic arrangement. The Przechowka book listed females and males all mixed together, generally in order of age or date of birth within the family. As already noted, this book is much more like the census form, with males on the left and females on the right. We should keep this in mind as we look at the entries in detail.

The extract above has the first two entries for our family. The numbers in the first column and the names in the second (or at least the top name) should be recognizable to all:

22. Benjamin Buller
22. Heinrich Buller

The first question that comes to mind is: Why number 22? The answer is simple: 22 is the family number, for lack of a better term, assigned to the Benjamin Buller family in the 1850 census. Of course, this raises an entirely different question: Why is the Heinrichsdorf church book using the Russian census numbers? It gives one the impression that the information collected during that census was used to fill in the church book—and that may in fact have been the case.

It seems reasonable that the village had a copy of the census in their possession and that they drew upon that copy while compiling the church book. This would also explain why they maintained the practice observed in the census of putting males on the left and females on the right. We know none of this for certain, but it seems a reasonable enough hypothesis.

Minimal information was recorded for Benjamin: his birth in the year 1789. Neither the day nor the month of birth nor anything about his baptism or marriage date is recorded; presumably it was not known to the person compiling this record. Since no date of death is entered, it is probably safe to conclude that Benjamin was still living in 1858.

Much more was known about Benjamin’s son Heinrich. He was born on 11 September 1823, was baptized on 17 June 1842, and was married (we will find out his wife’s name when we look at the next page) on 6 April 1845.

We should stop here and ask what we see—and especially what we do not see. It might help to look carefully at the 1850 census listing for the Benjamin Buller family. We will return to this point in the next post.