Nebraska railroad land

The serendipity continues. In addition to providing an article on Mennonites using straw to cook and heat their homes, American Agriculturist proved to be an interesting resource for learning more about early settlers’ purchase of land from the railroads.

Aunts Maria and Sara write in the Buller Family Record that, upon their arrival in Nebraska, their “grandparents [Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller] and their six children stayed with the Goertzens for about a week. During this time grandfather bought an 80-acre farm about 1¼ mile west from where Henderson now is. Dad grew to manhood on this farm.” Left unsaid is the identity of the seller, but Peter D and Sarah almost certainly bought it from the railroad.

UPDATE: The crossed-out sentence above is in error. In fact, Peter D and Sarah purchased the 80 acres from Johan Sperling, who had purchased the land from Adolph Reuber, who had homestead the parcel. See the 2024 post here.

The U.S. government had given railroads millions of acres as an inducement to building tracks across the nation. The railroads were expected to sell the land to settlers, then use the proceeds of that land sale to fund construction of the network of tracks. Once the tracks were built and the settlers were in place, the costs of maintaining the railroad service would be covered by the passengers and freight the railroads could carry.

In 1874, when the first wave of Russian Mennonite immigration was taking off, the railroads were in a heated competition to win settlers to buy their lands. Not only would the sale provide revenue for the railroads, but the settlers on a railroad’s land grant would become ready customers who would rely on the railroad to transport their crops and livestock. The Union Pacific received grants along the Platte River valley; the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Company received its grants to the north and across the southern part of the state (i.e., the Friend–Exeter–Fairmont–Grafton–Sutton–Hastings line). The railroad often received every other section along its track for a width of ten miles on each side of the tracks; this put the Peter D and Sarah farm on the edge of the B&MRR grant. (The orange shading in the map below is the B&MRR land in Nebraska.)

All that is background to what we find in copies of the 1874 American Agriculturist. The Burlington and Missouri River Railroad advertised repeatedly in this magazine, seeking to convince settlers to purchase land from them (instead of the Union Pacific). These advertisements are valuable to us for several reasons: first, they spell out the terms of sale, which helps us clarify how Peter D and Sarah were able to purchase 80 acres just after arriving in the U.S.; second, they include drawings of the areas for sale, which offer a contemporary view of 1870s central Nebraska.

We begin with a full ad, in order to see the terms, then follow with drawings from other ads in the series.

The writing is a little small, but the terms can be summarized as follows: (1) the land would be sold at a price between $3 and $10 an acre; (2) the purchaser could take ten years to pay off the balance due; (3) the only payments required for years 1–3 were for the interest of 6 percent on the purchase price; (4) in years 4–10, the purchaser paid both interest and principal; (5) payment of cash generally warranted a 20 percent reduction on the purchase price; and (6) if the purchaser had half of the land purchased under cultivation within the first two years, the purchaser could deduct 20 percent from the purchase price (this last provision obviously applied only to noncash purchasers).

So, for example, if Peter D and Sarah purchased 80 acres at $5 an acre, they would have owed $400 on the land. For years 1–3 they would have paid only $24 a year in interest; beginning with year 4 and continuing through year 10 they would have paid one-seventh of the principal ($57.14) plus the interest on the unpaid principal ($24 in year 4 but going down $3.43 each year after that). The terms were appealing for several reasons: (1) if one worked hard and had half the land under cultivation in two years, the price was reduced by 20 percent; (2) paying interest only the first three years allowed settlers to establish themselves by raising raise several crops before they had to worry about paying off the note. (For an 1877 B&MRR pamphlet spelling out terms in greater and somewhat different detail, see here and here.)

As noted above, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad placed a number of similar ads in the 1874 American Agriculturist. Interestingly, by 1879, when our ancestors arrived in Nebraska, there was little advertising being done. Presumably the rush was beginning to abate--or perhaps there was no need to advertise, since everyone knew that the best means of getting land was to purchase if from the railroads.

In any event, the sketches that accompanied the 1874 ads are worth viewing all on their own, as a window back in time to places familiar to us.

At least one of the ads above appeared as a colorized poster.

Now that we have a better sense of how our ancestors purchased their land, a subsequent post will discuss what they did with it once it was theirs.

American Agriculturist, 1873 and 1874

The American Agriculturist offers several other references to Mennonites. Two of them are made in the context of the earliest wave of immigration from Russia to the central United States. The first appears in the October 1873 issue (32:367):

The Mennonites.—A large body of Russians belonging to a peculiar sect of Christianity known as Mennonites have arrived in Harvey Co., Kansas, having purchased lands of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. These people will be an acquisition to the state of their adoption, being of a remarkably moral, industrious, and thrifty character. The present arrival is the advance guard of the whole community it is said, who leave their homes on account of their objection to conscription into the Russian army.

The second is from July of the following year (33:273):

The Mennonites.—These people are now arriving at their new Western homes. A few weeks ago, a body of three hundred and fifty arrived in New York, bringing a common fund of $60,000, and immediately started for their destination, in Nebraska. The industrious, frugal habits of these people, with their strong religious character, will make them as sturdy, persevering, and finally as successful a body of citizens as could be wished for.

There is nothing new in these descriptions; they are repeated here simply for archival purposes, as contemporary accounts of interest for Mennonite history.

A second look

Recently, while working through the 1845 list of Waldheim residents who had decided to return to Volhynia, an entry that I had no doubt looked at before jumped out at me. The head of household was named David Nachtigal. That was not the part that caught my eye; what follows David’s name did:

His relative Jacob Zielke remains here.

There is that last name Zielke again, the maiden name of Helena wife of David Buller and mother of Peter D. Might this be a relative of hers? We do not have many clues to go on, but we will see what we can turn up.

We know the members of Helena’s family from the Rovno register that we looked at earlier this year (see here). Helena’s parents were named Jacob and Maria, and she had four older siblings: Johann, Maria, Katherina, and Friedrich.

Listing of the Jacob and Maria Zielke family in the Rovno register

According to the GRANDMA database, there was a second Jacob Zielke family in Waldheim. This Jacob Zielke was married to Elisabeth (Eva) Sperling, and they had nine children, all of them born in Waldheim: Johann (1843), Jacob (1844), Maria Elizabeth (1848), Heinrich (1849), Abraham (1851), Eva (1853), Elisabeth (1856), Peter (1857), and Kornelius (1861).

So, which of the two Jacob Zielkes might be mentioned on the 1845 list—if either? We really cannot venture a guess, since either Zielke family could have been related to David Nachtigal. According to GRANDMA (265688), David was born in Danzig, Poland, which is where many Zielkes also originated.

What we can say—and what this note reminds us—is that there is no evidence either on the 1845 list or on the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census that any Zielke returned to Volhynia. In other words, when Helena and David left Waldheim for Heinrichsdorf, she was leaving her entire birth family behind to start a new life with her husband David and their small but growing family.

Buller Time blog does not want to forget about the Zielkes, so we will continue to look for them as opportunity arises, even when it requires taking a second look.

American Agriculturist, 1878

Periodically we stumble upon a contemporary account relevant to our Mennonite forebears; the most recent is an 1878 article in a monthly periodical titled American Agriculturist for the Farm, Garden, and Household (conveniently found in Google Books here).

To set this in historical context, the article was published just a few years after the first Mennonites emigrated from Russia to North America and a year before our ancestors Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller took up residence west of Henderson, Nebraska. One imagines that what is written and shown in the article applied to them as well, though we cannot know that for certain. I trust that readers will learn from and enjoy this interesting article.

*****

How the Mennonites Warm Their Houses and Cook with Straw as Fuel

The European Mennonites, whose religion prohibits bearing arms, have within a few years come to this country in large numbers, and have formed already prosperous colonies in Kansas and other Western States. In their new homes they follow their former pursuit—farming, and many of them brought with them the implements they formerly used, affairs so quaint and cumbersome, that they appear more like a collection of antiquities than articles for real use. Besides their farm implements, they brought over their household effects, conspicuous among which are a large clock to hang upon the wall, and a huge, curiously ornamented chest to hold the household treasures; these are to be seen in almost every Mennonite home. Though they could not well bring their enormous stoves to their new homes, they have brought their domestic customs with them, and the house in Wisconsin and Kansas is heated, and their meals are cooked in the same manner that they were in the old home in Russia and Prussia. Mr. H. Worrell, of Shawnee Co., Kas., sends us several remarkably neat sketches of Mennonite interiors, made with special reference to their methods of warming and cooking by the use of such an unusual fuel as straw. A portion of his sketches have been engraved and are given here. He also furnishes the following description:

“‘The Americans burn money, we burn straw,’ says the Mennonite settler; how they manage to keep warm in winter, and to cook the year round with no other fuel but loose straw, is a mystery to the average American. The Mennonite immigrant, when choosing a locality, is quite unconcerned at the total absence of timber, and will settle many miles from wood or coal, with indifference as to the fuel question, in localities where an American would never think of making a farm. He sees fuel for the first year in the miles of grass about him, the second and succeeding years he will have the straw from his crops, and straw stacks are his favorite substitute for the wood-pile and the coal-bin.

“We first saw straw in use for fuel at the house of a Russian Mennonite bishop in the colony in McPherson Co., Kansas. Dinner for four of us was to be prepared. A vigorous young Mennonite girl vanished with a bushel basket, and returned with it full of loose straw, then placing her kettles, etc., on the top of the cook range, fig. 1, opened the fire-door, and thrust in two large handfuls of straw, touched the match, closed the door, and the kettle commenced singing almost immediately; in about two minutes the door was again opened, and two more handfuls of straw were thrust in and the door closed. Our dinner consisted of ham, eggs, potatoes, Russian waffles, and excellent coffee, all cooked in less time than an ordinary stove could have been made ‘hot for biscuits.’ The fire was ‘dead out’ before the dinner was half consumed, and the house none the warmer for the fire, the surplus heat all escaping through the broad chimney.

“The cooking place and doors of the straw stove that heats the building, are all in the base of the chimney, which is eight feet square, with a stone floor; the walls are vertical for about 8 feet, when they are gradually brought in, reducing the interior of the chimney to about 13 inches at the comb of the roof. Figure 3 is a lengthwise section of a house of this kind. The upper portion of the chimney is the family smokehouse, in which are stored hams, shoulders, sides, and festoons of sausages hung on poles, permanently set in the walls, access being had to them by a ladder. On one side of the base is a large cauldron, for wash days, set in a furnace of adobe or sun-dried bricks; on the other side the cooking-range, also of adobe, having a sheet-iron top, with holes cut for the pots and kettles; both ranges, that for washing, and the one for cooking, have a flue of adobe four feet high.

“The heating stove, seen in section in fig. 3, and in the ground-plan, fig. 2, is 9 feet long, 8 ft. 6 in. high, and nearly 3 ft. wide, and forms part of the partitions of the three rooms heated by it. The ovens in this stove are formed at top and bottom of narrow plates of rough cast iron, set loosely in the stove walls, to admit of expansion and contraction, the doors are of sheet iron, and the walls two bricks thick. In ordinary winter weather, fire is made in the stove every morning, when two good armfuls of straw is consumed in from 30 to 30 minutes, this heats the stove sufficiently for the whole day; in very cold weather, the fire is made two or three times each day, burning an equal amount of straw at each firing. So soon as the fire is out, the flue connecting the stove with the chimney is carefully closed by a damper, in order to retain the heat. Bread is baked in the ovens, and also in the fire chamber of the heating stove, where it is placed, immediately after firing, on a wrought iron stool, which will keep it above the ashes of the straw.

“The most primitive cooking arrangement was seen in Harvey Co., it being a ‘hearth,’ like that in figure 4. This is merely a block of adobe or masonry, two feet high, built in the base of the ordinary style of chimney. The cooking is done on this by building a fire with straw and corn-cobs under each cooking vessel, much the same as with persons camping out. The material used in the construction of these straw-burning stoves is brick, stone, and adobe; brick is preferred, next stone and adobe for economy in the first construction.

Work Cited

How the Mennonites Warm Their Houses and Cook with Straw as Fuel. 1878. American Agriculturist. 27:474–73.

Heinrichsdorf history 7

The previous post in this series noted that nearly a third of the family groups who were involved in the founding of Heinrichsdorf, according to the 1850 census, had left by the time the village church book was begin in 1858. A more systematic comparison of the 1850 census with the persons listed in the church book provides a more accurate picture of just how much of the church left.

If you recall, Heinrichsdorf had a population of 273 according to the 1850 census. Between 1850 and 1858, six residents are known to have died. That seems low, but that is the total that the church book records or we are able to confirm from the GRANDMA database. Subtracting those six leaves us with a potential 267 residents.

We need to set aside an additional nine residents who may be in the church book, even though a first pass through did not find them. All nine were single young females who may have married, in which case they would then be listed with their husbands in the church book. None of the nine was spotted in the book, but we will set them to the side so as not to skew the numbers. 267 – 9 = 258 remaining.

Of those 258, 119 seem to have left the village before 1858; 139 remained. That is, over 46 percent left their new home, a remarkably high number. To be clear, this does not mean that Heinrichdorf’s population decreased from 273 to 139 or thereabouts. Not only were children born to those who stayed, but it is also possible that a few other families moved to Heinrichsdorf (although the church book does not reflect that much, if at all). Even granting that there was natural growth within the remaining group, the net population decrease was severe.

Fourteen of the twenty family names had at least one member leave, but five families accounted for two-thirds of all the departures, with Bullers leading the way.

• Buller: 19
• Böse: 18
• Funk: 18
• Ratzlaff: 13
• Schmidt: 10

The other family groups with members who left were Janz (7), Pankratz (7), Teske (7), Unruh (7), Wedel (5), Köhn (3), Franz (2), Voth (2), and Worbel (1). This had obvious consequences for the makeup of the church, as the Unruhs now became the largest family group in the church, and the Nachtigals and Voths moved into the top six and the Böses and Ratzlaffs dropped out (compare the family numbers in the previous post).

• Unruh: 26
• Schmidt: 23
• Funk: 19
• Buller: 13
• Nachtigal: 10
• Voth: 10

One wonders what led so many people to leave after such a short time in Heinrichsdorf. It would also be interesting to explore where they went. We know that David Buller and family went back to Waldheim. How many others did the same? How many also went to some other location in Volhynia, such as Michalin or the villages in the Ostrog area? We will seek to answer these questions as we have time and the resources to do so. For now it is enough to know with relative certainty that almost half of the Heinrichsdorf residents left within the first decade of the village’s existence.

Heinrichsdorf history 6

A follow-blown comparison between the 1850 census and the 1858 church book will take time, but we can gain a sense of the big picture even now. As mentioned earlier, the 1850 census presents the residents of Heinrichsdorf according to thirty-one family groups.

The church book adopts the same numbering scheme in its listing of people within the church. We noticed this when we examined the entries for the Benjamin Buller family, who was family 22 in the census and in the book. The church book includes the numbers when it lists toward the front of the book all the families that follow in a rough table of contents. So, even without looking through all the individual names entered in the book, we can gain a rough sense of which families from the census are still in the church (community) and which have already left.

The scan to the right shows the first of two pages of contents. Families 19–31 appear on the following page. Looking closely, we can already see that there are gaps in numbering, each gap indicating that that family no longer resides at Heinrichsdorf.

All told, ten of the 1850 census’s thirty-one families are missing from the 1858 church book. To be clear, ten of the thirty-one are entirely absent from the church book. Essentially a third of Heinrichsdorf’s original families no longer lived there less than a decade after the village was founded.

These families included the following (heads of household only):

3. Benjamin Ratzlaff
4. Jacob Buller
5. Jacob Georg Buller
9. Benjamin Heinrich Unruh
13. Samuel Böse
14. Benjamin Janz
16. Jacob Funk
23. David Heinrich Köhn
25. Anna Worbel
26. Jacob Pankratz

These ten families accounted for 69 of Heinrichdorf’s 273 1850 residents, so one might expect that at least 25 percent of the population left before 1858.

However, the number was no doubt higher. As we have already seen, some of the family groups that stayed had some family members leave during this same period. The Benjamin Buller family, for example, had two sons stay (Heinrich, Peter) and one son leave (our ancestor David). This was a net loss of five people for the larger family. No doubt other families experienced the same.

We will not know with any degree of accuracy the number who left until we do a full accounting of the church book in comparison to the 1850 census. We should not be surprised, however, if 30 to 40 percent of the church left within its first decade. Nor should we be shocked to discover that this trend continued for the next decade or more, since it seems that the group who emigrated to North America in 1874 was significantly smaller than Heinrichsdorf had been when it was initially founded.

Heinrichsdorf history 5

The primary historical sources that we have for Heinrichsdorf—the 1850 census and the 1858 church book—enable us to learn about this village not only at particular moments in time but also over the course of several decades, by comparing these particular moments with each other. Further, these source provide us the tools not only to discover the makeup of the community as a whole but also to trace the lives of the individual families who lived there.

The next posts in this series will touch on all these aspects of Heinrichsdorf’s history: the moment in  time and the historical trajectory of the broader community and its constituent families. We begin by looking into the data of the 1850 census, translated by Steve Fast (here).

1. Historical recap. As we learned earlier, Heinrichsdorf was not an existing village taken over by its Mennonite inhabitants but was rather a village newly founded by the group from Waldheim who had decided to return to Volhynia. They signaled their intent to return in 1845 and made the trip, it seems, in 1848, with the village being founded early in 1849 (see here). The 1850 census thus came only a year or, at most, two after the establishment of the village, which ensures that it provides an accurate picture of Heinrichsdorf in its earliest days.

2. Overview. Although the term village might evoke the image of a tiny hamlet, the census lists the names of 273 residents of Heinrichsdorf—a small town, to be sure, but more than a wide place in the road. These 273 residents were divided into thirty-one family groups, for an average of nearly nine people per family group. Many of the families no doubt lived in the same household under the same roof, but likely not all of them. We probably would not go wrong to imagine that Heinrichsdorf had perhaps thirty-five to forty households. One wonders if this village was organized like the villages in Molotschna and elsewhere, with houses arranged on both sides of a central road or street.

3. Demographics. Twenty family names are attested in the census, but six of them account for 192 out of the total 273 people.

• Funk: 37
• Schmidt: 33
• Unruh: 33
• Buller: 32
• Böse: 27
• Ratzlaff: 22

The other surnames in 1850 Heinrichsdorf were Teske (14), Voth (12), Nachtigal (10), Köhn (9), Schultz (8) Wedel (8), Janz (7), Pankratz (7), Ewert (5), Baltzer (2), Bayer (2), Franz (2), Klassen (2), Worbel (1). We have seen many of these surnames associated with each other in other historical documents. For example, the Przechowka church book includes sections for Wedel, Buller, Funck, Jantz, Köhn, Nachtigal, Pankratz, Ratzlaff, Schmidt, Unrau, and Voth. Similarly, the 1820 Rovno census included the names Buller, Nachtigal, Foth (= Voth), Beyer (= Bayer), Teske, Wedel, Köhn, Schmidt, and Pankratz. Obviously, these family groups had some sort of historical relation, or at least familiarity.

4. Demographics: gender. The 273 Heinrichsdorf residents included 144 males and 129 females, for a distribution of 52.7 percent males and 47.3 percent females.

5. Demographics: age. Given the large families that many Mennonites of that period had, one would expect a high percentage of children. Heinrichsdorf does not disappoint. What is particularly striking is how much of the population was so young. The table below shows the distribution for both genders and for the community as a whole.

ages	male total	male percent		female total	female percent		total	percent
0–17	81	56.3		64	49.6		145	53.1
18–35	30	20.8		36	27.9		66	24.2
36–60	23	16.0		20	15.5		43	15.8
61–	10	6.9		9	7.0		19	6.9
total	144		XX	129		XX	273

Clearly Heinrichsdorf was a young community by modern standards, with just over 77 percent of its population age thirty-five and younger. By comparison, the eighteen-and-under group accounted for 24 percent in the 2010 United States census. Whether this was young by nineteenth-century standards or in the Mennonite communities of that day remains to be seen.

If readers can think of any other questions they would ask of the data, please email me via the link at the top right of the blog. The next post will begin to compare the data from the census with that from the 1858 church book. We already know that some of the community left within Heinrichdorf’s first decade. We should be able to identify who left by comparing the census with the church book. What this will reveal is unknown, but the process of finding out should prove interesting and enjoyable.

There is Heinrichsdorf!

The community of Mennonite researchers, historians, and genealogists is remarkably helpful, always eager to share both resources and knowledge. Rod Ratzlaff is the latest to contribute to Buller Time’s quest to learn more about the world in which our family lived. An earlier post wondered about the location of Heinrichsdorf (see here) and offered two options that have been put forward.

Thanks to Rod, we can now confidently conclude that both options are wrong. Heinrichsdorf was not located northeast of Berdichev, as Schroeder–Huebert (1996) and Schrag (1959) claimed, nor was the village southwest of Berdichev, as the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe Volhynian Gazetteer indicated. In fact, Heinrichsdorf was roughly 12 miles northwest of Berdichev. The Google Maps satellite view below shows the earlier mistaken placements of the village (the pins on the right) as well as the correct location (the point of the arrow).

The map below (all the following maps were provided by Rod) is from 1889, well after the time our family lived there. The black line going diagonally from the upper left to the lower right is a railroad track, but it was not laid until 1871–1876.

The closeup below gives a better view of the layout and size of Heinrichsdorf at that time. Note the abbreviation Kol., which stands for “kolony,” a designation we have seen before to indicate that the village was inhabited by colonists, immigrants (see here).

The next image is from a 1917 Russian map. The arrow points to the village itself, and the name of the village sits on top and to the right: Кол. Генрихсдорфъ (Kol. Genrikhsdorf).

The final map is a 1931 Polish one (perhaps actually mapped in the early 1920s). The village is much smaller by this time, and it disappears entirely from later maps.

If I have my bearings correct, the Google Maps satellite photo below shows the previous site of the village. Comparing the photo with the maps above, the bend in the track on the right side of the photo is the best clue for locating the village.

Although our family left Heinrichsdorf long before it vanished from the face of the earth, they did leave some of their own behind. At the least, Heinrich and Anna Buller’s daughter Maria (i.e., our ancestor David’s niece) and Peter and Maria’s son Heinrich (David’s nephew) presumably remain buried somewhere near the site of the former village. Although not part of our direct line, they are still part of our larger family and deserve to be remembered just the same.

Again, thank you to Rod Ratzlaff for teaching us about Heinrichsdorf via the maps and information that he provided. Now that we know where Heinrichsdorf is, maybe someday one of our clan will be fortunate enough to visit the site.

Works Cited

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Schroeder, William, and Helmut T. Huebert. 1996. Mennonite Historical Atlas. 2nd ed. Winnipeg: Springfield.

Heinrichsdorf Bullers 2

We discovered in the previous post that the Heinrichsdorf church book does not record any events related to our family after 1861. The church book lists nearly 150 events during the years 1862–1874 in the pages preceding Benjamin Buller’s entries, but none for us. This led to a simple but seemingly inescapable conclusion: the last of our family members left Heinrichsdorf not too long after the last-recorded event. The GRANDMA database concurs.

We begin with the entry for Benjamin and Helena’s son Heinrich (i.e., David’s younger brother).

There are two things to note with the GRANDMA listing. (1) Heinrich and Anna Unruh Buller had a seventh child in 1861, a boy named Heinrich after his father. Heinrich Jr.’s older sister Eva is listed in the Heinrichsdorf church book, but he is not. (2) A note toward the bottom of the family entry states that Heinrich Sr. “was residing in Waldheim in 1862 per the Molotschna School Registers.” We will check that particular claim a little later, but for now it seems safe to conclude that Heinrich and Anna Unruh Buller and family left Heinrichsdorf sometime before the birth of their seventh child in 1861.

But what about Heinrich Sr.’s brother Peter, who is also entered into the Heinrichsdorf book? Peter and Maria Ratzlaff Buller had five children when we last saw them, and the birth of Benjamin on 31 January 1861 was the last Buller event recorded in the church book. However, GRANDMA knows of a sixth child, a son named Peter after his father, born on 20 March 1863. Peter Sr.’s GRANDMA entry immediately below shows Jr. at the bottom of the list.

When we look at Peter Jr.’s GRANDMA entry (below), we discover that it is reported that Peter Jr. was born in Waldheim, Molotschna colony. No source is provided for this information, but it is not hard to imagine this claim being true.

If the information gleaned from the Heinrichsdorf church book and GRANDMA is accurate, one can see a pattern repeated over the years. Benjamin and family made Heinrichsdorf their home in 1848, and the parents plus their three sons and their families were all listed on the 1850 census. However, by 1858 David and his family were gone, presumably back in Waldheim. A few years later brother Heinrich seems to have journeyed back to Waldheim as well, since his son born in 1861 is not listed in the church book. A year or two after that, brother Peter apparently followed David and Heinrich south to Waldheim, since his own youngest son was born in that Molotschna village in 1863.

Of course, we do not want to forget about the patriarch and matriarch of the family: Benjamin and Helena. Benjamin would have been seventy-two in 1861 and Helena anywhere between six to ten years younger. The fact that their deaths are not recorded in the Heinrichsdorf church book implies rather strongly that they returned to Waldheim with one of their sons, whether David in the 1850s or Heinrich or Peter in the early 1860s. We can never know, of course, but it seems most likely that our ancestors Benjamin and Helena died and were buried in Waldheim, perhaps in the same cemetery where their son (and our ancestor) David was laid to rest many years later.

Although the Heinrichsdorf segment of our family history seems to have come to an end, we are not yet done with Heinrichsdorf, nor are we done exploring new territory. Note in Peter Jr.’s entry above, for example, that he was married in a village named Kotlyarevka in Memrik colony. We should spend at least a little time acquainting ourselves with that, since it is part of our larger family story.

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.

Benjamin Buller 26

One last post (for now) about the Benjamin Buller family in the Heinrichsdorf church book. The 1850 census introduced us to Benjamin and Helena’s fourth and apparently last son: Peter (see here). At that time Peter was seventeen, single, and living at home; by the time of the compilation of the church book in 1858, he warranted his own pages.

Three males are listed on the left-hand page: Peter and his two sons, Heinrich and Benjam[in]. Note first that Peter and family are still identified as family 22 (far left column), as a part of the Benjamin Buller larger family.

The record for Peter includes his date of birth (23 September 1832) and his date of baptism (17 May 1851). Based on his year of birth we know that he was born in Volhynia (precisely where is another matter), before the family made their first journey to Waldheim; in light of his baptism date, we can state with confidence that it took place in Heinrichsdorf (or the immediate area), after the Benjamin Buller family moved there from Waldheim.

Peter’s firstborn son, named Heinrich, had a short life: born on 24 October 1857, he died before the age of two, on 22 February 1859, at 9 in the morning (9 Uhr Morgens). Then came Benjamin, who was born 31 January 1861, at 5 AM (Uhr 5 Morgens).

On the right-hand page opposite are the females of the Peter Buller family, Peter’s wife and their three daughters.

Peter married Maria Ratzlaff, who was born 6 February 1837 and was baptized at age fourteen on 17 May 1851, the same day of Peter Buller’s baptism. The 1850 census seems to indicate that Maria was the youngest daughter of Benjamin and Helena Ratzlaff. (GRANDMA does not know that Maria was the daughter of 353925 and 353926.)

Peter and Maria’s first child was a daughter, Anna, who was born on 23 January 1855. Their second child was also a daughter, Helena, born 22 March 1856. After Heinrich was born the following year, a third daughter was born on 6 September 1859: Maria.

So much for the Heinrichsdorf records on the Peter Buller family. But that is not the end of the story. We will circle back to take a broader look at the church book and then follow that with additional information provided by the GRANDMA database. There remains more that we can say about our family’s residence at Heinrichsdorf.

Heinrichsdorf church book

This brief post seeks to tie up a few loose ends with the church book. We are by no means done with it, but it will be good to take care of these items.

First, thank you to Manuel Janz for clarifying some of the German words that earlier left me less than certain about the readings. We can now confirm the following.

1. The word that appeared to be what seemed an impossible Gegeboren is actually Ist geboren, that is, “was born.” The two words frequently appear run together (top photo, left) but are clearly separate in some examples (bottom photo). The first two photographs are from the Benjamin Buller page 60; the second set are from later in the church book.

Notice also that the i is capitalized in three of these examples but lowercased in the fourth (bottom photo, right). This last example is actually the easiest for a novice to read, since the dot above the i is a helpful clue.

2. Manuel also explains that the first word in each line below (before Frau) is dessen, translated in this context as “whose.” The first example is from the Helena Buller page 61; the second example is from later in the book.

The second example strikes me as easier to read, but the first is no doubt legible to those with more experience deciphering and reading different types of handwritten German.

3. What I thought might be the word im (= in dem, or “in the”) is rather den, “the.” Thus, the correct reading of Anna Unruh’s birth entry below is: “Ist geboren 1819 den 7te Februar,” which would be translated “Was born 1819, the 7th of February.”

4. Finally, Manuel confirms that the word before Anna Unruh the elder’s name is Wittwe, which is a variant spelling for Witwe, or “widow.” As we have seen on a number of occasions, spelling was not fully standardized during the nineteenth century.

Thank you to Manuel for those clarifications. We also owe sincere thanks to the Mennonite Library and Archives (see here) located at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, for posting photographs of the Heinrichsdorf church book for us to view. All Buller Time photographs of the church book are from the MLA (see here).

Benjamin Buller 25

The last post addressed an oddity with the Benjamin Buller section of the Heinrichsdorf church book: the presence of Anna Unruh the elder among a family of Bullers. We deduced from the evidence that Anna probably joined the Buller household (likely the Heinrich Buller one) because she was widowed and was now living with her daughter Anna Unruh Buller and family: Anna’s husband Heinrich and their daughters.

One final note about the widow Anna Unruh. Presumably she was listed where she was because she was the oldest female member of the household not married to Benjamin. That is, Helena Buller was listed first because she was married to the head of household Benjamin. Then followed Anna Unruh the elder because she was the next oldest female in the house. After Anna the mother was listed Anna the daughter, followed by daughter Anna’s six daughters.

With that loose end tied up, we are ready to turn to the entries for Heinrich and Anna’s daughters.

The daughters’ names and dates of birth are clear enough:

• Helena: 18 July 1846
• Maria: 2 November 1848
• Susana: 7 April 1851
• Elisabeth: 4 August 1853
• Cathrina: 11 March 1856
• Eva: 30 October 1858

A few details merit further comment.

1. For the first time in the Benjamin Buller entries we see an entry in the far right column, which is where dates of death are recorded. Heinrich and Anna’s second daugher Maria, who was born in late 1848, died at the age of six in early 1855, 7 January, to be exact. We read earlier in the Jacob D. Epp diary about the high incidence of child mortality (here); this entry is a reminder that many families of that time were familiar with this grim reality.

2. The youngest daughter, Eva, has not only her date of birth recorded but her time of birth as well: 5:00 AM (Morgend = morning). One wonders if that detail is recorded because it happened close in time to the compilation of the church book.

3. The information here is consistent with that recorded in the 1850 census (see here). Heinrich and Anna had only two daughters at that time: Helena and Maria.

4. According to the GRANDMA database, Heinrich and Anna had a seventh child after Eva, a son named Heinrich. It is worth noting that the entry does not list a source for this information, which is always cause for caution. If the entry is accurate (whatever its source), then the fact that this 1861 birth is not recorded in the Heinrichsdorf church book may imply something important: maybe Heinrich and Anna and family left Heinrichsdorf after Eva’s 1858 birth but before Heinrich Jr.’s 1861 birth. The GRANDMA entry for Heinrich Sr. says that he ended up back in Waldheim, but we need to check that out before we take any of this as more than a possibility.

That closes out the first two Benjamin Buller pages in the Heinrichsdorf church book, which covered Benjamin and Helena Buller, their son Heinrich and Anna Unruh Buller and their six daughters, and Anna Unruh Buller’s widowed mother Anna Unruh. The next post will turn to another of Heinrich and Anna’s sons: Peter.

Benjamin Buller 24

Having covered the first Benjamin Buller page in the Heinrichsdorf church book—collecting what information we could about Benjamin 2 and his son Heinrich, then discussing why David and family do not appear anywhere in the book—we are ready to examine the next page, which lists the female counterparts to Benjamin and Heinrich on the first one.

As explained earlier, information about male family members was recorded on a left-hand page; that for female family members appeared on the facing right-hand page. Husband and wife are roughly aligned across the pages, with children listed below parents: boys below their fathers and girls below their mothers. The composite scan below shows how the two pages were laid out side by side.

There is obviously a lot more writing on the female side of these Benjamin Buller pages, and it will require careful work to make sense of it all. It is easiest for us to begin at the bottom of the list and work our way up. The last name written in the name column (the wide one on the left) is Eva, and five additional names appear above hers; as we will see, all six names have the heading Töchter, or daughter. Above them is their mother, whose position across from Heinrich indicates that she is his wife, so the six girls are their daughters.

Above the line for Heinrich’s wife are two additional entries, and here is where it becomes terribly complicated.

We begin with the column headings. With no claim to having it correct, I read the heading of the first column as Weiblichen Nahmen, which one can translate as “female names.” The main problem with this reading is that the word for “names” typically has no h, being spelled Namen. However, because the content of the column supports this reading (the column records the names of the female family members), we will accept the reading until it is proven incorrect.

The other three columns are easier to read (especially when one knows what to expect in them). They record the dates of birth (Geboren), baptism (Getauft), and death (Gestorben). Before we move on, notice that the label Töchter is fairly clear in this extract. We see also that Heinrich’s first daughter was named Helena, just like Heinrich’s own mother.

All that is interesting, but we want to focus on the first three lines, since that is where we encounter some complications.

Line 1: The first word is not clear to me (additional time and effort—and expertise—are needed), but the second and third are obvious: Frau Helena. That is, this is the line for Benjamin’s wife Helena. We see in the next column that she was born (the word appears to be Gegeboren, but I do not think that can be correct) sometime in the year 1799.

This is the first complication. According to the Rovno register (here) and the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census (here), Helena was four to six years younger than her husband Benjamin. We know that he was born in 1789, so a birth year of 1799 for Helena seems mistaken.

Lines 2–3: We treat these entries together, since we really cannot understand either one in isolation. The first curiousity to notice is that the name on both lines is the same: Anna Unruh. The word at the beginning of line 2 is unclear at first glance; we may return to it later. The word at the beginning of line 3 is the same as at the beginning of line 1, so we will attempt to decipher both at some point. Obviously, the word before Anna Unruh in line 3 is Frau, which identifies this person as Heinrich’s wife (since he is across from this line on the left-hand page).

If line 3 identifies Anna Unruh as Heinrich’s wife, then who is the Anna Unruh in line 2? This is where the GRANDMA database becomes valuable. We see in the second column that Anna Unruh in line 3 was born on 7 February 1819 (written “1819 im [?] 7 Februar”). The Anna Unruh on line 2’s entry is not as clear with its date, but it seems reasonable to read her date of birth as 15 February 1785. (I find it interesting that the exact dates of birth are know for the two Unruhs but not for Benjamin or Helena Buller.)

A simple search of the GRANDMA database for an Anna Unruh born in 1819 returns an interesting result.

Anna Unruh 402143 was married to Heinrich Buller, so this is the right person. Notice her mother’s name: Anna Ratzlaff—who married Benjamin Unruh. Her married name was thus Anna Unruh. According to GRANDMA, Anna Ratzlaff Unruh was born 17 February 1784, which resembles in some respects our date of 15 February 1785. Unfortunately, GRANDMA does not record the source for its 1784 date of birth, so we cannot judge which one is more likely right.

Two additional pieces of information fill out the picture. First, according to GRANDMA, Benjamin Unruh died in 1833, which means that the person is line 2 is the widow Anna Unruh. It is tempting, in light of this information, to read the first word of line 2 as Witwe, or widow, but the spelling just does not seem right for that. The word remains undeciphered. Second, the 1850 census lists a Benjamin Unruh whose mother Anna lived with him and his family (family 9 on the census), an Anna Unruh whose age listed would place her date of birth in 1785.

How does this all fit together? Heinrich Buller was married to Anna Unruh Buller, daughter of Anna Ratzlaff Unruh. As a widow, Anna Ratzlaff Unruh lived with her children, first her son Benjamin and his family, then her daughter Anna Unruh Buller and her family. The fact that Anna Ratzlaff Unruh is listed with the Benjamin Buller larger family in the church book certainly implies that by 1858 she was living with them. For whatever reason, she no longer lived with her son Benjamin and his wife, nor did she live with her other son David and his wife or any of her other children and their families.

We may never know why Anna Ratzlaff Unruh chose to live with her daughter Anna and son-in-law Heinrich Buller. One thing we do learn from this mystery solved is that the compiler of the church book did not woodenly copy the material from the 1850 Russian census, even if it served as a source of information for him. Earlier Anna Ratzlaff Unruh had been listed with family 9; now she appears with family 22, which presumably was reflective of her current situation.

The next post will turn to Heinrich and Anna’s six daughters, after which we will cover yet another son of Benjamin and Helena. There is still a great deal of information to process and organize as we reconstruct our broader family story.

Benjamin Buller 23

The previous post introduced the Buller pages (yes, there are multiple pages) in the Heinrichsdorf church book. There we examined the entries for Benjamin Buller and his son Heinrich. We ended with a question about what we saw—or rather, what we did not see. The hint was the 1850 Russian census, and especially the fact that the church book seems to follow it rather rigorously, even to the point of including the families in the same order as the census and assigning them the same numbers found in the census.

If the church book follows the census, then someone is missing between Benjamin and Heinrich, the son who was older than Heinrich, who was the oldest son of Benjamin and Helena to emigrate back to Heinrichsdorf: our ancestor David. As the older of the two sons, he should have been listed immediately after Benjamin, just as he was in the 1850 census. The fact that he is not is significant. The fact that David and family appear nowhere in the Heinrichsdorf church book speaks volumes.

We know that David, Helena, and their three children Helena, Peter D, and Elisabeth all came to and lived in Heinrichsdorf; the 1845 list of Mennonites wishing to return to Volhynia and the 1850 census both prove that beyond reasonable doubt. Now we know that, at the time of the creation of the church book, they were no longer in Heinrichsdorf.

Two questions arise: When did David and family leave Heinrichsdorf? Where did they go? The second of the two questions is easiest to answer. We know that David spent the latter years of his life in Waldheim, Molotschna colony, so one may safely assume (until evidence indicating otherwise comes to light) that he and his family left Heinrichsdorf and retraced their steps southeast 400 miles to Waldheim, where they had lived for most of the 1840s. The three parallel lines in the lower half of the map below represent the three moves that David made. The red one in the center represents his 1839 trip as an unmarried man accompanying his father and mother and siblings from Volhynia to Waldheim; the blue one on the bottom represents now-married David’s 1848 move from Waldheim to the soon-to-be-founded village of Heinrichsdorf; the purple line on top indicates his final move back to Waldheim in Molotschna colony, made sometime after 1850. But when?

The date on the cover of the church book pictured at the top of the post is our only clue. On the last line of the title section of the cover one can see the year 1858. This is presumably the date that the book was started. As we noted earlier (here), one of the introductory pages records an event from September 1861, so obviously the book was added to for a number of years. (Inspection of the book will no doubt reveal the latest date of birth, baptism, marriage, or death recorded, which will give us a better sense of the “life” of the book.)

If 1858 was the year that someone began compiling the book, and if the process of creating the book began by recording all those people in the 1850 census who were still in Heinrichsdorf, then it would be reasonable to conclude that David and family left sometime between 1850 (the year of the census, on which they appear) and 1858 (the year of the church book, in which they do not appear). Anything more definitive than this is impossible for us to say at this point.

There is, however, one more question that we should ask, even though we have no hope of answering it at this time: Was Helena Zielke Buller alive when David and family moved back to Waldheim? Of course, we do not know with certainty when Helena died. The Buller Family Records lists only “1855?” This likely reflects the fact that David and Helena’s last son was born 14 February 1855. One wonders if Helena died as a result of complications or illness associated with that childbirth.

Even more intriguing is when Helena passed away in relation to the family’s location. Did she die while they lived in Heinrichsdorf? If so, then David moved back to Molotschna as a single parent with six children, three of them under the age of seven. This is possible, but a more reasonable (at least to us) option would have been to stay in Heinrichsdorf near his parents and several siblings who could perhaps assist him in caring for the children until he remarried.

If Helena passed away after the family’s final move, then we might imagine that David and family moved sometime between 1850 and 1854. It seems reasonable to expect that David and family did not return to Waldheim alone, that a group of Heinrichdorfers moved back at the same time. Maybe by comparing the 1850 census with the 1858 church book, we will be able to identify all those who went back to Waldheim, and perhaps by doing so we will be able to narrow down the time frame of our family’s final move to Waldheim. For now, all we can do is wonder is how Helena’s death fit into the larger framework of our family history.

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.