Now that we have completed the Bullers in The Mennonite series, I plan to direct our attention to various family history items (mainly photographs and letters) that Carolyn (Peters) Stucky provided to us. This post features two photographs taken in Hawaii.
Before we turn to those photos, we need to set the context. We begin with a December 2015 post about Peter P Buller’s younger brother Jacob (here). J. P., as he was commonly known, taught in public schools in Nebraska, Texas and Idaho, then moved to Hawaii in the early 1920s and worked in the public school system there as a teacher and a principal until he retired in 1942.
We caught a hint of J. P.’s Hawaiian residency in a post earlier this year that reproduced Henry’s remarks at the 1990 family reunion (here). Specifically, Henry spoke of a 1936 vacation that Peter P, Margaretha, Sara, and Maria enjoyed in Hawaii; Henry does not mention why they traveled to Hawaii, but it was almost certainly for Peter P to visit his younger brother. According to Henry, the four made their voyage to Hawaii before completing their move to California.
Yet another post, this one from August 2016 (here), offers further details about the Hawaiian trip. That post features the trunk that the travelers used on their voyage, which is now on display in the Immigrant House at the Mennonite Heritage Park in Henderson, Nebraska. Although the year listed on the placard for the trunk is incorrect (the trip was not in 1940), the rest of the information appears to be correct.
All that background leads us to the photographs that are the subject of this post. The photos themselves are quite small: 2.5 x 1.75 inches. As you can see below, one is set landscape, and one is portrait. Both photos have captions on the back, one clearly written by Maria and the other probably so.
Maria wrote the following on the back of this photograph: in Hawaii on the steps [scribbled out] Uncle J. P. and Mrs Buller and we four Dad and Mother Sara and myself Maria in 1936.
J. P.’s wife was Elizabeth Gordon Buller; then thirty-eight, she was eighteen years younger than her fifty-six-year-old husband. Peter P and Margaretha were sixty-six and sixty-five, respectively; Sara was thirty-six and Maria twenty-seven.
The back of the second photograph reads: Mother and Dad at Uncle J. P. Buller’s home in Hawaii 1935 and 1936.
The reference to 1935 is new and leads one to ask when exactly the trip was made. Fortunately, the online availability of ship manifests (passenger lists) from this time provide a clear and simple explanation.
The ship manifest shown below (for a larger image, see here) is for the family’s voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii. We learn from this manifest that they sailed on the S.S. Mariposa (see here), leaving port on 10 December 1935.
The 2,100-mile trip typically took five to seven days at that time (see here), so we can safely assume that they arrived in Honolulu around mid-December 1935. In other words, the caption on the back of the second photo offers more accurate information than we have previously had: the Hawaiian adventure began toward the end of 1935 and extended into 1936.
This begs the question, of course: When did the trip to Hawaii end? Family Search’s database of ship manifests comes to the rescue once again. As indicated in the manifest shown here, the family left the port of Honolulu aboard the S.S. Lurline (see further here) on 21 March 1936 and arrived in San Franciso five days later, on 26 March.
The length of their vacation in Hawaii—three months!—provides insight into why the family needed a trunk to carry their clothes and other necessities. This was no short spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a lengthy excursion that must have required a substantial investment of time and money. It seems to have been a final splurge, as it were, before Peter P and Margaretha sold the farm and retired to California in August 1936 (see here). I can only hope that somewhere down the line we discover more photographic or perhaps even journalistic evidence about this amazing trip.
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