Before the line. Joannes Say and Maria Vereecken, about 1612 to 1653

This chapter is different from the others. Every generation from Livinus Saij onwards is proven from records that name the father of each son. Joannes Say and Maria Vereecken are not proven to be Livinus's parents. They are, on the present evidence, the most likely couple, and this chapter sets out why. If the deed of 1659 described at the end is ever found, it may confirm them or rule them out.

A wedding in June 1614

On 14 June 1614 a young couple were married at Sint-Joris in Sleidinge: Jaecques Burreme and Stoffelijntken Vereecken. The priest wrote down the names of two witnesses. One was the wife of a Georgius Vereecken, very probably the bride's brother. The other was a man called Joannes Saij.¹

This is the first time the name Say appears in the Sleidinge registers as a living person, and it appears as a witness at a Vereecken wedding. It is the reason for this chapter.

Joannes Say was already married by then, and already a father. His wife was Maria Vereecken. Their first child had been buried four months earlier, on 4 February 1614, without a name in the register: kind, a child.² Where Joannes and Maria were married is not known. The Sleidinge marriage register runs from 1608 without a gap, with between eight and thirty weddings a year, and theirs is not in it.³ Couples were normally married in the bride's parish, and Maria's family lived in Sleidinge, so perhaps they married before 1608. Or perhaps they married in Joannes's own parish, and he came from somewhere else. Either way, his baptism and his parents are beyond the reach of the Sleidinge books.

Maria's family

Who Maria was can be glimpsed, though not proven. The Vereeckens were an old Sleidinge family; in the court papers the name is often written van der Eecken, "of the oak", which is what Vereecken means. Two households have a claim to her, and one fits much better than the other.

Joos Vereecken and Christina de Roo. In July 1620 the court of Evergem drew up an inventory for the children of Joos van der Eecken, whose wife Christina de Roo had just died. It names the young children Cornelis, Hans and Betken; a son Christoffel, who acted as guardian; a married daughter Joorijntken, wife of Pauwels de Brabanter; and a son Jooris Vereecken.⁴ Several of these people turn up around Joannes Say and Maria:

• In 1614, the other witness at the Burrem wedding beside Joannes Say was "the wife of Georgius Vereecken", very probably the wife of this Jooris.
• In 1623 the godfather of Joannes and Maria's daughter Maria was a Cornelius Vereecken.
• In 1627 the godmother of their daughter Elisabeth was "Elisabeth, wife of Gerardus Willems". A later inventory shows that she was Elisabeth van der Eecken, daughter of Joos.⁵
• And the family owned land on the Volpenswege. In 1661 an inventory made for one of Joos's great-grandchildren listed a share in "another farmstead at Sleidinge, on the Volpenswege, held undivided with Cornelis van der Eecken, son of Joos".⁶ That is the road where Livinus lived all his married life.

A family tree published online by another researcher makes Maria a daughter of Joos and Christina, and carries their ancestry back to about 1500, to a Jacobus van der Eecken and a Christophorus van Vlaenderen of Sleidinge.⁷ The inventory of 1620, at least in its published summary, does not name a Maria among Joos's children. But it does not list them all: Christoffel appears only as guardian, and Elisabeth only as the young "Betken". A married daughter living with her husband would easily be left out of so short a summary.

Cornelis Vereecken and Lievine Steenbeke. The other candidate is a Cornelis Vereecken who was buried in October 1617. The inventory made for his young children in 1618 mentions, in passing, "Maeyken Vereeken, half-sister of the orphans", the daughter of his first wife Lievine Steenbeke.⁸ A Maeyken old enough in 1618 to be named on her own could be Maria. But nothing else links this household to Joannes Say.

On balance Joos Vereecken and Christina de Roo are the likelier parents: three of their children stood beside Joannes and Maria at the font or the altar, and their family's farmstead lay on the road where Livinus later lived.

The children

Joannes and Maria brought at least six children to the font at Sint-Joris, and buried most of them.⁹

• A child, buried on 4 February 1614.
• Joanna, baptised on 24 May 1615. Her godfather was another Joannes Say. A father could not stand godfather to his own child, so there was a second, and probably older, Joannes Say in or near the parish. He may have been the child's grandfather. Joanna died in May 1626.
• Joannes, baptised on 20 June 1617, with Joannes Van Quakebeke as godfather. He was buried on 6 April 1619.
• Anna, baptised on 19 July 1620.
• A daughter, buried on 10 August 1622.
• Maria, baptised on 3 October 1623.
• Elisabeth, born at eleven in the morning on 12 April 1627, whose baptism was read from the original register for this history (see chapter 4). She was probably the Elisabeth Say, daughter of Joannes, who was buried on 22 July 1631.

And, if the argument of this chapter is right, a son: Livinus, born about the end of 1627 or early in 1628, whose baptism has not been found.

Maria herself took her part in the life of the parish: in October 1624 "Maria, wife of Joannes Say" stood godmother to a son of Sacharius Verhelst and Joanna Basselaers.¹⁰

1629

Maria Vereecken died in the late summer of 1629 and was buried on 6 September.¹¹ If Livinus was her son, he was then about eighteen months old, and his mother's death may explain why his baptism is the one that cannot be found: a child born in a difficult year, perhaps at his mother's family's house, perhaps in another parish.

Joannes did not stay a widower for long. Seven weeks later, on 29 October 1629, he married Elisabeth Rogiers at Sint-Joris.¹² With her he had three more children: Livina, born on 30 May 1630, who lived only a day; Petrus, born at eleven at night on 13 October 1631; and Maria, born on 15 January 1634.¹³ In 1630 and 1631 Elisabeth stood godmother twice, and Joannes once, always as "the wife of Joannes Say" and "Joannes Say".¹⁴

After 1634 the family vanishes from the Sleidinge registers. There is no burial of Joannes Say at Sleidinge, so he may have died elsewhere, but he was dead by January 1653, when Elisabeth Rogiers was buried as his widow.¹⁵ Their children Petrus and Maria do not appear again, as brides, grooms, godparents or burials. Neither do Anna and Maria, the daughters of the first marriage. For more than twenty years, from 1634 until Livinus's wedding in 1655, the only Say in the Sleidinge registers is a Livinus Saij who married Judoca Teerlinck there in 1645 and was dead within three years, a different man, as chapter 4 shows.

Why Joannes and Maria?

Five things point to them.

1. "Lieven, son of Jan". Twice, in 1689 and again in 1699, the court of Evergem called Livinus "Lieven Saeij fs Jan".¹⁶ Joannes Say is the only Jan Say known to have lived at Sleidinge in the years when Livinus was born.
2. The division of 1659. Livinus's own estate inventory refers to a division of property made on 10 April 1659 between him and "the heirs of Jaecques Burrens".¹⁷ Jaecques Burrens was the Jaecques Burreme who married Stoffelijntken Vereecken in 1614, with Joannes Say as his witness. He died in 1652, and his widow, "Christophora Vereecken, widow of Jacobus Burmer", in March 1657.¹⁸ Two years later Livinus divided property with their heirs. A division is made between people who own something together, most often members of one family who have inherited it. The simplest explanation is that the property had come down in the Vereecken family, and that Livinus held his share through his mother. Whether Stoffelijntken, the bride of 1614, was herself a daughter of Joos Vereecken is not known; she is not named in the short summary of 1620.
3. The godparents. Margareta Steenbeke, godmother to a Burrem child in 1624, was godmother to Livinus's first son in
4. A Joannes Mersman, whose wife Anna Burrens was very probably a daughter of Jaecques Burrens, stood godfather to Livinus's daughter Maria in 1667. And in 1679 Livinus's son Jan stood godfather to a Meersman child.¹⁹ The families stayed close for three generations.
5. The Volpenswege. Livinus lived and died on the Volpenswege, where the Vereecken family of Joos, most probably Maria's father, owned a farmstead that was still shared among his heirs in 1661.⁶
6. The first son's name. Livinus and Maria Van Kerrebrouck named their first son Joannes, as Flemish custom suggested for the paternal grandfather.

Why it is not proven

Three things stand against it, and they should be stated as plainly as the arguments for it.

• No baptism. The Sleidinge baptism book for 1628 is complete, with ninety-one baptisms spread over every month of the year. None of them is a Livinus Say.²⁰
• The dates are tight. Livinus died in January 1699 "in the seventy-second year of his age", so he was born between January 1627 and January 1628. His sister Elisabeth was born in April 1627. Both can be true only if Livinus was born around January 1628, or if the age at his burial, given by his family, was a year or so out, as ages at death often were.
• The Vereecken sisters are not proven. Nothing yet shows that Stoffelijntken, the wife of Jaecques Burrens, and Maria, the wife of Joannes Say, were sisters or otherwise related. Vereecken was a common name in Sleidinge. There was even a second Stoffelijntken Vereecken, a daughter of Cornelis who was still a minor in 1618. And the division of 1659 could, in principle, have been a sale.

So this chapter offers Joannes Say and Maria Vereecken as the most likely parents of Livinus, not as proven ones.

What would settle it

The deed of 10 April 1659 itself. It is not among the estate inventories that have been published, so it is probably in the court's registers of inheritances and property transfers for those years. Those survive, unindexed and not digitised, in the archive of the Graafschap Evergem at the State Archives in Ghent. If the deed says the land came to Livinus "from his mother's side", or names Maria Vereecken, the question is answered. The same archive holds the land registers of Sleidinge-Sint-Baafs for 1619–1655, which may show where a Say or a Vereecken held land on the Volpenswege before Livinus.²¹

And if it is answered, the line can go further back: to the older Joannes Say who stood godfather in 1615, and on Maria's side to Joos Vereecken and Christina de Roo, and through them to Vereeckens and Van Vlaenderens who lived in Sleidinge around 1500.