Peter D and Sarah’s Farm 10

The previous post in this series ended with the 1910 census securely locating Henry Buller, son of Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller, on the family farm in the northeast quarter of section 12 of Farmers Valley precinct. Left unanswered was the question of who owned the farm at that time. This post will marshal evidence from both the 1910 census and the 1900 census to suggest a plausible answer to that question.

We begin with the 1900 census, the first census taken after Peter D’s death in September 1897. Sarah is now listed as the head of the family, and four of her children are still living with her: Jacob, Henry, Abraham, and Mary.

The information recorded in this census form is quite similar to what we saw earlier. Sarah is a white female who was born in August 1847, and at the time of the census she was a fifty-two-year-old widow. The next two numbers record the number of children a woman had borne and then the number of those children still living. Sarah had given birth to eleven children, but one of them (the first daughter named Mary/Maria) died on the same day as her birth (see the Buller Family Record). Note also that the household had a new member: Maggie (Margaretha) Quiring, a twenty-year-old servant. Maggie was the daughter of Kornelius and Justina Quiring, who lived in Beaver precinct just to the north of Farmers Valley.

To locate where Sarah and her household lived, we can adopt the same approach as we did with Henry: identify the people listed before and after Sarah to determine if that provides any clues.

81: Peter Griess

82: Fred Segrist

83: Peter Fuhner

84: Effie Douglas

85: Sarah Buller

86: Henry Pankratz*

87: Charles Williams

88: Lewis Riker

89: James Beat

The evidence for Sarah’s location is not nearly as clear as it was for Henry. Only one name is asterisked as someone who was known to have lived in the same vicinity as the Buller farm. However, that name in and of itself deserves notice, since Henry Pankratz was also the name that appeared immediately after Henry’s family in 1910. Based on this evidence, we can say only that it is possible, but not certain, that Sarah and her family still lived on the Buller family farm three years after Peter D’s death.

Thankfully, other evidence from the 1900 and 1910 censuses increases our level of certainty. We begin with the 1910 census. As shown in the previous post, the census recorded a wide variety of information, including the person’s occupation, industry, employment type, out-of-work status, weeks out of work, ability to read, ability to write, attendance at school, whether one owned or rented, mortgage status, the type of household, whether farm or house, and the farm schedule. The 1910 census records the following for Henry:

Henry’s occupation was farmer in the general farming industry, and he was self-employed (OA in the form means “own account”). The next two columns are blank, meaning that Henry was not out of work at the present nor had been out of work during the past year. The yes answers in the two following columns tell us that he could read and write, and the following blank means that he did not attend school. Our main focus of interest is the next column, which contains an R. This indicates that Henry rented his farm land. Consequently, he did not have a mortgage (the column is blank). The final two columns report that his household was a farm (F) and that further information could be found in farm schedule 118 (many of these records were destroyed long ago in a space-saving measure).

A comparison of Henry’s 1910 form with the same section of his mother’s 1900 form is enlightening.

In 1900, the columns in this section recorded a person’s occupation, the number of months he or she was not employed, attendance at school, whether one could read, write, and speak English, whether one owned or rented, mortgage status, the type of household, whether farm or house, and the farm schedule. Thus we see that Sarah is identified as a farmer who was employed all twelve months of the prior year. She did not attend school (the column is blank) and could read and write (yes, yes) but could not speak English (no). Most important for our purposes, Sarah owned (O) her farm and had a mortgage on it. The household was a farm, and further information was recorded in farm schedule 87.

So, in 1900 Sarah owned the farm where she lived, which might have been the original Buller farm, and in 1910 Henry rented the farm where he lived, which almost certainly was the family farm. Taken together, what do these two pieces of evidence imply? The most logical explanation is that Sarah and family continued to live on the original farm after Peter D passed away in 1897 and that sometime after 1900 but before 1910 Henry, who married Maria Janzen on 3 October 1901, took up residency in and took over responsibility for Peter D and Sarah’s farm. Since Henry is listed as a renter, not an owner, it appears that Sarah retained ownership of the farm, at least through 1910.

This historical reconstruction is by no means certain, but it does neatly weave together various strands of evidence found in records contemporary with the events (the censuses). As usual, some questions remain unanswered, most notably: When did Sarah leave the farm and Henry move in? Where did Sarah live after she left the family farm? Further hints about the answers to these questions will be the subject of the following post.