Chapter 8. Bernardus Saey and Marie Therese Vervaet, on the Landsdijk, 1803 to 1870

The eldest son

Bernardus, the eldest son of Judocus Bernardus, was born at Bassevelde on 25 April 1803, in the Kraeygemstraat, under the French Republic. The birth act of chapter 7 is his.¹ He grew up a Bassevelde boy with two younger brothers, Jean François and Ange, later Engelbertus. He was seventeen when his mother died in March 1821, and eighteen when his father married again, to a woman less than five years older than himself. He was twenty-eight when his father died, in September 1831, in the first months of the kingdom of Belgium.²

For another ten years we lose sight of him. When he appears again, in 1842, he is thirty-eight and about to be married.

Marie Therese from Zelzate

His bride was Marie Therese Vervaet, from Zelzate, a village on the canal from Ghent to Terneuzen, about ten kilometres east of Bassevelde. She had been born there at four in the morning of 15 October 1813, when Zelzate was still a commune of the French department of the Scheldt. Her father, Jean Baptiste Vervaet, was a weaver, forty-three years old, born at Ertvelde. Her mother, Livine Marie Vermeire, came from Evergem, the parish next to Sleidinge that had given the family a bride two generations before.³

The act was written in French. It ends, like so many in this history, with a note that the father could not sign. Only one witness, a young clerk named Dominique Vermeire, could.³

Bernardus and Marie Therese were married at Zelzate on 23 February 1842. He was thirty-eight and she twenty-eight.⁴ It was a year of borders. Belgium had been recognised by the Netherlands in 1839, and on 5 November 1842 the two kingdoms signed the treaty that fixed the line between them, completed the next year at Maastricht.⁵ The new frontier followed the old one through the Four Ambachten. A few kilometres north of the Landsdijk, the fields of Bassevelde and Boekhoute now ended at a state border, and beyond it lay Dutch Zeeland.

The dyke

The couple made their home on the Landsdijk, north of the village. The name is exact: it is a dyke, and they lived on top of it. The Landsdijk is part of the Graaf Jansdijk, a sea dyke probably built at the end of the thirteenth century and raised about 1400, and what it was built to hold back was the Braakman, the sea inlet that had drowned fifteen villages and still came inland as far as Boekhoute and Philippine, which were ports on it.⁶ By Bernardus's day later reclamation had left the dyke inland, a raised road through the polders, and the sea was a few kilometres further off than it had been. With the strong growth of the population in the nineteenth century it became a busy polder hamlet of its own. In 1897 the Bernardine sisters opened a school and a small convent there, and in time the hamlet became a parish.⁶

Their son Eduardus was born in 1844 or 1845. His birth act has not yet been found: he was thirty-three when he married in August 1878, which puts his birth between August 1844 and August 1845.⁷ A daughter, Amelia, followed at five in the morning of 24 August 1848, and her birth act is the only record in this history that gives the family's address with a number.

Bernardus, forty-five, described perhaps as a schaepweider, a shepherd, came to the mayor that same morning.⁸ The child had been born in zyne wooning op den Dyk alhier, Sectie J nummero twee en zeventig: "in his house on the Dyk here, section J, number seventy-two." The clerk seems to have given the address in the terms of the land register, the cadastre, with a section letter and a parcel number. The next entry in the register, ten days later, is for the daughter of a neighbour, the farm labourer Jacobus van Waes, born op den Dyk alhier, Sectie J nummero zesenzeventig: on the Dyk, section J, number 76.⁹

The Popp cadastral map of Bassevelde, drawn in the middle of the nineteenth century, shows the land parcel by parcel, with their numbers. In section J, beside a road junction by the canal, parcels 72 and 72bis and parcel 76 lie next to each other, about a kilometre and a half north-west of the village church. The modern street that passes the spot is still called the Landsdijk. It is probably the place where Amelia was born, and where Eduardus grew up.¹⁰

The act ends: den comparant heeft verklaerd niet te kunnen schryven, "the declarant stated that he could not write." His father Judocus had signed Bernardus's own birth act in 1803. Bernardus never learned.⁸

The hungry forties

Amelia was born into the worst years that nineteenth-century Flanders knew. The spinning of flax yarn by hand, the work of some 220,000 spinners in their cottages, had already been ruined by British machine spinning around 1830. Then, in the summer of 1845, a fungal disease appeared in the potato fields near Kortrijk. Between 1845 and 1847 it destroyed the potato crops of north-west Europe. Hunger brought typhus and cholera with it. An estimated 44,000 people died of hunger and disease in Belgium in those three years, some 30,000 of them in East and West Flanders. In the decades that followed, Flemings left in growing numbers, first for France, and from the 1870s by ship from Antwerp to New York.¹¹

What these years meant for the house on the dyke the records do not say. The family were labourers: Bernardus worked for others, and Marie Therese worked on the land. They came through.

Deaths on the dyke

Bernardus died at one o'clock in the night of 13 November 1861, in the Landsdyk quarter of Bassevelde, aged fifty-eight. His son Eduardus was about sixteen, and Amelia thirteen. It was not the family who reported the death, but two men described as acquaintances of the dead man: the municipal secretary, Ivo Haers, and a shoemaker.¹²

Marie Therese lived nine years longer, as a widow and a farm labourer on the dyke. She died at ten in the evening of 3 September 1870, in what the act calls the hamlet of Landdyk. The next morning two men went to the mayor: her son, Eduard Saey, dienstknecht, a farm servant, and his uncle, Engelbertus Saey, a farm labourer, Bernardus's youngest brother.¹³

The act gives her age as fifty-eight, two years more than she was, and it ends with a sentence that sums up three generations: de comparanten hebben elk afzonderlyk verklaard niet te kunnen naamteekenen, zulks nooit geleerd hebbende, "the declarants each stated that they could not sign their names, never having learned."¹³ Judocus Bernardus had signed every act he appeared in. His sons Bernardus and Engelbertus, and his grandson Eduard, could not write their names.

Amelia

Amelia stayed at Bassevelde. In 1880, a labouring woman of thirty-one, she married Victorinus Amandus Dumonsau, a labourer from Kaprijke. At the wedding she declared under oath that she could not produce proof of where her grandparents on either side had died, a formula the clerks used in place of the grandparents' death certificates.¹⁴ She could not sign her name.

By then her brother was gone. Some time in the 1870s Eduardus crossed the border to work in Zeeland, and in 1878 he married at IJzendijke.¹⁵ His story, and the family's life in the Netherlands, is the subject of the next part.