Thursday, February 14, 2013

The Buller study

As I work my way through all of these Buller wills I had a rather frightening thought of how good it would be to have a Buller one name study. Fortunately I was able to decide that I couldn't possibly take on such a big study. By the time I am done with these seventy wills though I will have quite a picture of the Buller family. My fingers are itching to reach Warwickshire wills as my Buller family was in St Olave Southwark and St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey when my 3x great grandfather Christopher Buller and his wife Mary Beard were having their family. Then my 2x great grandfather Henry Christopher Buller married first Sophia Scrooby and had a family of two children all of whom had died by 1836 (leaving him a widower at 31 years of age) but his butcher shop was on Lamb Conduit Way in London although he moved his family to Lambeth likely to protect them from illness but they succumbed anyway. Then I find him traveling between London and Birmingham where he married Anne Welch (she was 18 and he was 33) (my 2x great grandmother) and the two of them ran a butcher shop and restaurant in Birmingham and the butcher shop in London. Henry appears on the 1841 census in London with Anne at her parent's home in Birmingham (along with their first born child Henry Buller). Anne's father was a restaurant owner as well. I found Christopher very very early on in my research back in 2004 but have never been able to move further back on the Buller side. The Welch side proved to be quite straightforward.

The Buller family in Warwickshire is generally in the Coventry area and they were farmers. That seems a long reach for my Christopher Buller with his Slop Shop (sailor uniforms) and perhaps not quite so long for my Henry Christopher Buller and his butcher shop.

The Buller family is fairly large and the general criteria for largeness is how many on the 1881 census and there were 975 individuals with the surname Buller. Comparing that with Pincombe (one of my one name studies) at 146 individuals and Blake (my other one name study) 14,428 individuals is actually a surprise. I thought there would be more than 975. However, it is virtually impossible for me to take on Buller at the moment but perhaps I can persuade someone else to do it. They really are a very fascinating family with so many connections into old and aristocratic families in the British Isles. That isn't one of my strong interests but truly I would love to find the parent/parents of Christopher.

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