Part Two. Towards the border

Chapter 6. Bernardus Saeij and Maria Anna van Hijfte, 1748 to 1809

The last Sleidinge generation

Bernardus was born at Sleidinge in January 1748, while the French held Flanders, and was baptised twice on the day of his birth, as chapter 3 told. He was the only one of Joannes and Georgia's five sons whose later life the records follow. He lost his father in January 1767, when he was eighteen, and his mother in December 1770.¹ By then he was married, and he was a father himself.

His bride was Maria Anna van Hijfte, a girl from Evergem, the next parish, a few kilometres to the south-east. They were betrothed in her parish church on 26 December 1768, in the week after Christmas, before two witnesses: Georgius van Hecke and Isabella van Hijfte, one of her own family. The three banns were read on the three Sundays that followed, and on 7 January 1769 the parish priest of Evergem, Dominicus van Belleghem, married them before the same two witnesses. He wrote the betrothal and the wedding into a single entry, and he spelled the groom's name in the short Evergem way, Say.²

Maria Anna's first name wanders through the records in a way that would puzzle anyone looking for her: she is Joanna Maria, Anna Maria and Maria at the baptisms of her children, Marie in 1800, Joanna Marie in 1802 and Anne Marie in 1821.³ Two baptisms at Evergem could be hers. One is that of a Joanna Maria van Hifte, baptised on 24 April 1749. The other is on page 57 of the Evergem baptismal register, under the heading Septembris: Marianna, born at about five in the morning of 5 September 1750 and carried to the font the next day. Her godmother was another Marianna van Hijfte; the godfather's name has gone with the torn corner of the page.⁴

The two are sisters. Both are daughters of the same couple, Livinus van Hijfte and Maria Anna Denaes, also written Den Haese, and it is this family that the Saeij records keep pointing back to. Their house can be put on the map, and their sorrow dated. On 25 November 1758 Lieven van Hyfte, son of Guilliaeme, died at Evergem Meirbeke, and on 7 February 1759 the court divided his estate. The clerk listed his widow, Marie den Haese, daughter of Pieter den Haese and Livijne Janssens, and the five children she was left with: Joanna Marie, ten, Marie Anna, eight, Isabelle, six, Frans, five, and Livijne, one. Her brother-in-law Joannes van Hyfte and her own brother Jacobus den Haese were appointed guardians on the two sides. The girl Bernardus would marry ten years later was one of the two eldest, a child of eight or ten standing in that room.⁵ Isabella van Hijfte, who stood as witness at the wedding in 1769 and as godmother to Petrus Franciscus in 1771, was baptised at Evergem in 1753, the next sister but one. In 1782 and again in 1788 the godmother of one of the babies was a Maria Denaese, or Den Haese, "from Evergem": the grandmother, who lived until 1810.⁶ So the house Bernardus married into is not in doubt. Which of the two girls he married is: the register in 1769 calls the bride Joanna Maria, which is the elder sister's name, while every later tree makes her the younger. One of the two may have died as a child - the Evergem burials would say - and until they are read, the safest thing to write is that Bernardus married a daughter of Livinus van Hijfte and Maria Anna Denaes, born at Evergem in 1749 or 1750.

Ten children

For twenty years the babies came, all of them carried to Sint-Joris to be baptised:⁷

• Joannes, born on 25 October 1769, at ten at night. His godmother was his grandmother Georgia.
• Petrus Franciscus, on 15 March 1771, with Isabella Van Hyfte as godmother.
• Joannes Franciscus, on 12 October 1772, godfather a Franciscus Saey.
• Petrus Dominicus, on 23 April 1774.
• Bernardina Coleta, at half past eight in the morning of 15 February 1776.
• Judocus Bernardus, at half past five in the afternoon of 17 August 1777, with Petrus Franciscus Van Hyfte as godfather. He is the next link in the chain.
• Isabella Theresia, on 13 March 1780.
• Coleta, at one in the morning of 22 April 1782. Her godfather was Petrus De Muynck, who had married Bernardus's cousin Joanna Saey the year before.
• Severinus, on 29 August 1785.
• Victoria, on 22 January 1788, at ten at night. The midwife, Carola Hennebaut, baptised her during the birth.

From 1774 on, the entries usually add that the father was "from Sleidinge" and the mother "from Evergem".⁷ Van Hyftes stood godparent to three of the children, and people from Evergem to two more. Maria Anna's family was close at hand.

The parish kept its own count of losses. A baby boy of Bernardus and Maria Anna died unnamed on 2 January 1791. On 27 December 1793 Petrus Dominicus died at nineteen, unmarried.⁸ He is the last of Bernardus's household to appear in the Sleidinge registers. It had been the family's parish for almost a hundred and forty years.

The world turned upside down

The children grew up in years when the old order of the Austrian Netherlands began to shake. In the 1780s the emperor Joseph II, Maria Theresa's son, pressed through reforms that many of his subjects saw as an attack on the Catholic Church. In 1789 they rose against him. An army of exiles crossed the border and defeated the Austrians at Turnhout on 27 October 1789, and in January 1790 the provinces declared themselves independent as the United Belgian States. No foreign power recognised them. By December 1790 the Austrians were back.⁹

Then came revolutionary France. On 6 November 1792 a French army defeated the Austrians at Jemappes, near Mons, and eight days later Brussels fell. The French were driven out again after their defeat at Neerwinden on 18 March 1793. The next summer they returned, and after the battle of Fleurus on 26 June 1794 the Austrians gave up the Low Countries for good.¹⁰ On 1 October 1795 the Austrian Netherlands were annexed to the French Republic. The old county of Flanders disappeared from the map. Sleidinge, Kaprijke and their neighbours became part of the department of the Escaut, the Scheldt, with Ghent as its capital. The new department also took in the strip of Dutch Flanders across the old border, which the new Batavian Republic had ceded to France that same year.¹¹

Kaprijke

Some time in these years, between the burial of Petrus Dominicus at the end of 1793 and the spring of 1800, the family left Sleidinge. They went to Kaprijke, about ten kilometres to the north, towards the Dutch border.¹²

Kaprijke was an old place. It is first mentioned in 1233, and in 1240 the Countess of Flanders, Johanna of Constantinople, gave it a charter of freedom. It had two parts: the rural Kaprijke Buiten, and the busy centre, Kaprijke Binnen, around its green, the Dries. In the Middle Ages its people made cloth. After 1421 they turned to flax and linen, and from 1626 until the end of the old regime Kaprijke was a lordship.¹³ On the Ferraris map of 1777 its centre is picked out in red among the fields. Bassevelde lies to the north-east, and along the top of the sheet runs the dyke, with the reclaimed polders beyond it.

On 17 June 1796 civil registration was introduced in the Belgian departments. The registration of births, marriages and deaths passed from the parish priest to a municipal official, and the family's records change character from that moment. They are no longer short Latin entries but civil acts, in Dutch or in French, naming parents, ages, trades and witnesses. They are dated by the calendar of the Republic, with its years counted from 1792 and its months with new names, until Napoleon abolished it on 1 January 1806.¹⁴ Under the French, Kaprijke was also the seat of a canton, and a law of 1798 required marriages to be celebrated at the seat of the canton, before an official of the Republic. So for a time couples from all the villages around came to Kaprijke to marry.

The calendar was not the only thing the Republic changed. Its campaign against the Church closed churches and persecuted priests, and in 1798 a new law made young men liable for conscription. In October of that year the countryside of Flanders rose in the Peasants' War. The rising began at Overmere, east of Ghent, on 12 October 1798 and was crushed near Hasselt on 5 December. Many thousands died in the fighting, and the French executed some 190 people afterwards.¹⁵ No record found so far connects anyone in the family with it.

A wedding in the Temple of the Law

The first family record of the new regime is a wedding. On 30 Floréal of the year VIII of the Republic, which was 20 May 1800, Bernardus's daughter Bernardina Coleta, twenty-four years old, married Joannes Franciscus Claeys of Oost-Eeklo at Kaprijke. The ceremony was held in what the act calls the Tempel van de Wet, the Temple of the Law, in the chief town of the canton. The officiant was the president of the canton's municipal administration, acting under the law of 13 Fructidor of the year VI.¹⁶

The act describes the bride as spinster van staet, a spinner by trade, living at Bassevelde, and the daughter of "Bernard Saeij ende van Marie van Hyfte". Her birth at Sleidinge on 15 February 1776 was proved from an extract of her birth record. Her witnesses were a labourer from Oost-Eeklo, a clerk, the field guard of Kaprijke, and a nineteen-year-old sugar baker.¹⁶ Two years later, in July 1802, her brother Judocus Bernardus married at Bassevelde. His story is chapter 7.

The gin seller of Kaprijke

In the early hours of 18 April 1809, at about one o'clock in the night, Bernardus died at Kaprijke. That same day two men came to the mayor to declare the death: a notary, aged forty-three, and a man of private means, aged thirty-four. The mayor wrote the act in French, the language of the Empire:

Bernard Saeij natif de Sleydinge débitant de Genièvre agé de soixante un ans fils de feu Jean et de Jossine Stopherus, Epoux de Marie Van hyffe demeurant audit Capryke: "Bernard Saeij, native of Sleidinge, seller of gin, aged sixty-one, son of the late Jean and of Jossine Stopherus, husband of Marie Van hyffe, living in Kaprijke." The hamlet where he lived is written in a word that is hard to read, perhaps Kerzelaere.¹⁷

So in his last years Bernardus sold genever, the juniper spirit of the Low Countries. Whether he kept a tavern or sold it by the jug the act does not say. The ages fit: born in January 1748, he was sixty-one. "Jean" is the French form of Joannes. "Jossine Stopherus" is the clerk's version of his mother's name, Georgia Stofferis, heard and written down almost forty years after her death.¹⁷ Bernardus died a subject of the Emperor Napoleon, in a department of France.

Maria Anna

Maria Anna outlived him by at least twelve years. On 30 November 1821 she was at Bassevelde for the second marriage of her son Judocus Bernardus. She was then living at Kaprijke and working as a werkvrouw, a labouring woman. She was present and gave her consent. At the end of the act the clerk noted that she could neither write nor sign her name.¹⁸ When and where she died has not yet been found.

Of the ten children baptised at Sleidinge, only two can so far be followed in the records of Kaprijke and Bassevelde. One is Bernardina Coleta, the spinner who married in the Temple of the Law. The other is Judocus Bernardus, who became a farmer at Bassevelde.