Heinrichsdorf Bullers 1

It is often productive to look at information from a variety of angles and perspectives, to ensure that we see all that it can teach us. Having examined our family’s Heinrichsdorf entries in detail, we now take a step back and look at the broader picture.

The table below includes all seventeen members of the Benjamin Buller family who are listed in the Heinrichsdorf church book. The order of names has been altered to make the relations easier to see: husbands and wives are listed together, and children are place in birth order, not separated by gender. Blank lines set apart the smaller family groupings: Benjamin–Helena, Heinrich–Anna and their daughters, and Peter–Maria and their children.

name	birth	baptism	marriage	death	relation
Benjamin Buller	??/??/1789	—	—	—	head of household
Helena ?? Buller	??/??/1799	—	—	—	wife of Benjamin
Heinrich Buller	09/11/1823	06/17/1842	04/06/1845	—	son of Benjamin
Anna Unruh Buller	02/07/1819	—	—	—	wife of Heinrich
Helena Buller	07/18/1846	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Maria Buller	11/02/1848	—	—	01/07/1855	daughter of Heinrich
Susana Buller	04/07/1851	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Elisabeth Buller	08/04/1853	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Catharina Buller	03/11/1856	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Eva Buller	10/30/1858	—	—	—	daughter of Heinrich
Peter Buller	09/23/1832	05/17/1851	—	—	son of Benjamin
Maria Ratzlaff Buller	02/06/1837	05/17/1851	—	—	wife of Peter
Anna Buller	01/23/1853	—	—	—	daughter of Peter
Helena Buller	03/22/1856	—	—	—	daughter of Peter
Heinrich Buller	10/24/1857	—	—	02/22/1859	son of Peter
Maria Buller	09/06/1859	—	—	—	daughter of Peter
Benjamin Buller	01/31/1861	—	—	—	son of Peter

Several things stand out in the listing.

1. Only three baptisms are recorded, one from before the family’s move to Heinrichsdorf and two after. Given his 1842 year of baptism, Heinrich Benjamin was baptized in Waldheim, when he was nineteen. Peter Benjamin and his wife Maria Ratzlaff were baptized the same day at Heinrichsdorf; Peter was nearly nineteen, while Maria had just celebrated her fourteenth birthday. The older adults no doubt were baptized long before they moved to Heinrichsdorf; one would expect the younger Bullers to be baptized beginning in 1865 or thereabouts (for Helena daughter of Heinrich and Anna).

2. Both Heinrich–Anna and Peter–Maria lost a child, which means that Benjamin–Helena lost two of their eleven grandchildren living in Heinrichsdorf. That is a fairly high percentage. Worth noting is that no other deaths are recorded, even for Benjamin, who was seventy-two when his last grandson recorded in the book was born.

3. This leads us to an important observation: no family event is recorded after the birth of Benjamin Peter Buller in 1861. Did whoever was in charge of the church book stop recording at that point? Or was this group of Bullers no longer at the church?

A quick check of the pages prior to Benjamin Buller’s puts to rest any thought that the church book stopped recording events after 1861. In fact, the fifty pages before Benjamin Buller is listed contain 142 events dated to the years 1862–1874, when the congregation moved to the United States. That is an average of nearly ten events for each year during that period.

Unless the Heinrichsdorf church simply stopped caring about the significant events in the lives of the Benjamin Bullers (unlikely), the only reasonable explanation is that the entire family left sometime after 1861. We know that our ancestors David and Helena left before 1858; it is highly likely that the rest of the family—David’s parents and his brothers Heinrich and Peter and their families—followed his lead, if not in his footsteps, and left Heinrichsdorf.

The GRANDMA database offers additional information that will clarify the picture for us, but that must wait for another post.