GM 7a, ???? ???? Buller

This post begins with an admission of ignorance. There is really no doubt that Grandpa Chris’s great-grandfather David was married twice (see here), but beyond that we can say very little, at least at the beginning of the post. Who knows what we might be able to say at the end?

David’s second wife is represented in the Buller chart below (and in the title to the post) with mostly question marks. We know she existed, but we do not know her first or last name or her date of birth.

To complicate matters further, some of what the GRANDMA database tells us about David’s second wife is apparently mistaken.

Sources: The main sources of information about David’s second wife are the Buller Family Record and several letters written to Die Mennonitische Rundschau in the early 1900s.

1. Buller Family Record


2. 22 March 1905 Mennonitische Rundschau


3. 2 May 1906 Mennonitische Rundschau


4. 25 February 1907 Mennonitische Rundschau

Name: The Buller Family Record has no knowledge of this woman’s name, but GM claims that she was a Ratzlaff.

This is the biggest question mark of all. It is troubling that the GM entry offers no source for David’s second wife being a Ratzlaff. The Notes section of the David Buller GM entry simply states: He may have married twice. His second wife may have been a Ratzlaff.

As we will shortly see, there is no doubt that David Buller was related to Ratzlaffs, but the question remains: How was David related to Ratzlaffs? Was it through his second wife? The closest thing to evidence that we have appears to be a 22 March 1905 letter (link 2) that David’s son Heinrich wrote to Die Mennonitische Rundschau. There he included the following sentence:

Ich habe noch mehrere Vetter und Richten in Amerika: Johann Ratzlaffs kinder, deren Mutter Vaters Schwester war und Jakob Ratzlaffs Kinder, welcher der Mutter Bruder war.

I have several cousins and direct relatives in America: Johann Ratzlaff’s children, whose mother was father’s sister, and Jacob Ratzlaff’s children, which the mother’s brother was.

Two Ratzlaffs are in view here. (1) According to Heinrich, the mother of Johann Ratzlaff’s children was his father’s (David Buller’s) sister. Thus, from this we can conclude that David Buller had a sister who married Johann Ratzlaff. (2) Heinrich also mentions Jacob Ratzlaff’s children, “which the mother’s brother was.” This last phrase is difficult, but it obviously is clarifying who Jacob Raztlaff was. One might translate the last part as: “the children of Jacob Ratzlaff, who was the mother’s brother.”

This prompts us to ask: Whose mother was the mother? In my first reading I assumed that Heinrich was referring to some unnamed Ratzlaff woman whose brother was Jacob Ratzlaff. However, upon closer inspection, it seems more likely that Heinrich Buller is referring to his own mother as having Jacob Ratzlaff as a brother. This would mean, of course, that Heinrich’s mother was born a Ratzlaff.

Although one might expect a reference to one’s own mother to use the phrase “meine Mutter” (my mother), we have evidence to the contrary from Heinrich himself. The 25 February 1907 letter (link 4) includes the following sentence:

Die Mutter ist diesen Winter schon oftmals kränklich, sie hat oft Kopfschmerzen.

Mother is often sick this winter; she frequently has headaches.

Here “die Mutter” is clearly Heinrich’s mother, which lends credence to the view that “der Mutter” in the 22 March 1905 letter may well refer to his own mother as well. (The words die and der both mean “the”; the two forms are different cases of the same word.) If this is correct—and I believe that it is—one might properly translate the last part of the sentence in question as follows: “the children of Jacob Ratzlaff, who was Mother’s brother.”

According to this understanding of Heinrich’s sentence, David Buller was related to Ratzlaffs in at least two ways: (1) David’s sister (name unknown) married Johann Ratzlaff, and (2) David”s second wife was herself a Ratzlaff, a sister to Jacob Ratzlaff. If this latter statement is true, then we can also determine from which family David’s second/Ratzlaff wife originated.

The Jacob Ratzlaff listed below had a son also named Jacob; the son is the Jacob Ratzlaff mentioned by Heinrich Buller (for the evidence allowing us to identify the son Jacob via his wife Eva Voth, see further here).

This presumably means that one of the female children listed here with no husband identified may have been David’s second wife; that list would include the first five daughters: Helena, Maria, Anna, Catarina, Sara. Little is known of any of these women; of all the daughters recorded here, only the youngest, Nelcke, has a husband listed. All of the other five would have been of child-bearing age at the time of David’s second marriage and thus are plausible candidates for being his second wife.

This seems a good place to stop with David’s second wife, but only after we recap. GM states that David Buller’s second wife was a Ratzlaff. Several of his son Heinrich’s letters to Die Mennonitische Rundschau lend credence to that claim. In fact, if our reading of Heinrich’s letters is correct, we can identify into which Ratzlaff family David’s second wife was born. Finally, based on all this we might also plausibly suggest that her name was Helena, Maria, Anna, Catarina, or Sara.

The next post will take up the other matters known and unknown about ???? Ratzlaff Buller; the title of that post will also reflect our current identification of her.