Chapter 15. How you can help: the records still to be found

This history is proven, record by record, from Livinus Saij's wedding in 1655 to the present. Before 1655 it tells the most probable story, and chapters 1 and 2 say on every page where that story is inferred rather than read. The documents that would turn inference into proof exist. They sit, unindexed, in the State Archives in Ghent, and none of them is online. This chapter is written for any member of the family who lives near Ghent, passes through it, or knows someone who does. It says what to look for, where, and what to bring back.

The archive

The Rijksarchief Gent (State Archives at Ghent) is at Bagattenstraat 43, 9000 Gent, a few minutes' walk south of the city centre. Telephone +32 (0)9 265 76 70; e-mail rijksarchief.gent@arch.be. The reading room is open on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9.00 to 16.30 (in July and August it closes from 12.00 to 13.00), and is closed on Mondays, Fridays, weekends and public holidays. A place must be reserved online at least two working days ahead, through the reservation tool on the archive's website, www.arch.be. A reader's card is made on the spot with an identity card, and consulting the records is free. Check the opening hours before travelling; they were correct in September 2026.¹

Records are ordered by the number they carry in the archive's inventory (inventaris), and the reading room staff will bring the inventory of a fonds on request. Ask whether you may photograph the pages yourself; if not, the archive sells scans, and identified items can also be ordered from home through the "Order a reproduction (payable)" button on the fonds' page in the archive's online catalogue, AGATHA.²

What this history needs from any find is simple: a photograph of each page that names a Say, Saey, Saij or Sey, with the fonds, the inventory number and the folio written down. Reading the seventeenth-century hand can be done at home afterwards. Send the pictures to Jeroen Saeij.

The documents, in order of what they would settle

1. The children of Joannes Say the elder, Destelbergen (chapter 1)

What it would settle: whether Joannes Say the younger, who took the family to Sleidinge, was a son of Joannes Say the elder and Livina Buyle, and whether Jacobus, Gerardus, Balduinus and Livinus were his brothers.

Where: fonds AR32, "Destelbergen. Schepenbank en Parochie, 1598-1795", the papers of the village court.³ Ask for the staten van goed (estate inventories), wezerijboeken or wezenrekeningen (orphans' accounts) and the ferieboeken or resolutieboeken of the court for the years 1621 to 1635. Joannes senior died on 20 February 1621; Livina Buyle, his widow, on 17 July 1627. Look for Say, Saij, Sey, Saey with the first names Jan (the father), Lievijne Buyle, Buyls or Buijls (the mother), Jacques, Geeraert, Bauwen, Lieven and Jan de jonghe (the sons), and for any deed of sale, lease or partition in which a Jan Say is described as living at Sleidinge (woonende te Sleydinghe) after 1613.

2. The division of 10 April 1659 between Lieven Saeij and the heirs of Jaecques Burrens (chapter 2)

What it would settle: whether Livinus Saij held his share of that land through his mother, and so who his mother was. If the deed says the land came van moederswege, from the mother's side, or names Maria Vereecken or Jan Say, the question of Livinus's parents is answered.

Where: fonds AR48, "Graafschap Evergem", the court that governed Sleidinge-Sint-Baafs and the Volpenswege.⁴ The deed is not among the published estate inventories, so it is in one of the court's other series. Look, in this order, at: the court's day-books (ferieboeken), items 669 (1657-1659) and 670 (1659-1660), around April 1659; the bundle of estate papers, accounts and divisions, item 269 (1657-1659); the register of the same, item 230 (1648-1660); and the series of inheritances and transfers of property (erfenissen en onterfenissen), items 450-527, for 1656-1659. The names to look for are Lieven Saeij (also Saey, Say, Saij), Jaecques Burrens (also Burreme, Burme, Burmer) and Christophora or Stoffelijntken Vereecken.

3. The original estate inventory of 1620 for the children of Joos van der Eecken (chapter 2)

What it would settle: whether Maria Vereecken, the wife of Joannes Say, was a daughter of Joos van der Eecken, and whether Joos had a first wife before Christina de Roo. The published abstract lists the heirs incompletely.

Where: fonds AR48, bundle 265 (estate papers 1612-1621); the inventory is dated 29 July 1620 (Neyt, vol. VI, no. 22).⁵ Look for the full list of heirs and for the words Maeyken or Marie, Jan Say or Saey, and eerste huwelijk (first marriage).

4. Three more originals in the same fonds (chapter 2)

• The inventory of 1618 for the children of Cornelis Vereecken (Neyt, vol. VII, no. 345; folio 310v of the register it abstracts), which names "Maeyken Vereeken, half-sister of the orphans": the full text may name her husband.
• The sale of the late 1640s by Jooris and Cornelis van der Eecke, sons of Joos, of a farmstead on the Volpenswege to Pieter Dielmans (Neyt, vol. VII, no. 461; folio 107 of a register of 1647-1648, marked "incomplete act" in the abstract): the full act may list every heir with a share.
• The inventory of 1632 for the children of Christoffel Rogiers (Neyt, vol. VI, no. 115), which names their grandmother Margriete Vereecken and may list her children, among them Elisabeth Rogiers, Joannes Say's second wife.

5. The inventories of our own line, for the record (chapters 3 to 5)

These are known from their published abstracts and need no proof, but the originals would give the house, the land, the debts and the relatives that the abstracts leave out. All in fonds AR48: bundle 281 (Maeyken van Kerrebrouck, died October 1688, inventory 13 July 1689; Neyt vol. VI no. 955); bundle 285 (Lieven Saeij fs Jan, died 20 January 1699, inventory 11 February 1699; vol. V no. 520); bundle 289 (Lievijne de Muijnck, 9 June 1706; vol. V no. 142); bundle 301 (Jan Saij fs Lieven, 10 January 1720; vol. IV no. 1); bundle 348 (Jan Saij fs Jan, 1 July 1767; vol. II no. 387).⁶ A draft letter asking for scans of these, in Dutch, is kept with the working files of this history.

6. The Keure van Sleidinge (chapter 2)

The other court of the parish, fonds AR172, "Sleidinge Keure. Parochie en Schepenbanken", may hold the estate papers of Jacobus Burrens (died 1652) and Christophora Vereecken (died 1657), who lived at Wittemoer in the Keure, and any list of their co-heirs. The published index of its inventories from 1642 has no Burrens entry, so the papers, if they exist, are in the unindexed series.⁷

7. Joosijntken van Hyfte, Kluizen (chapter 6)

In the estate inventory of Pieter Saey of Kluizen, 23 February 1644, Ambacht Assenede, register 1033, folio 175v, one line would settle whether the Evergem and Kluizen Say families were one: does the original call his first wife fa Christoffels, daughter of Christoffel? The published abstract does not say.⁹

What can be done from home

Anyone with an internet connection can do these, on the archive's AGATHA site (free, after registering) or on FamilySearch (free, after registering), where the same microfilms of the parish registers are online.

• Destelbergen, marriages 1600-1621 and baptisms 1598-1627 (register 1598-1621, pages 78-102 and 1-72). Read the witnesses at the weddings of Balduinus Say (21 October 1618, page 96), Gerardus Say (17 July 1621, page 101) and Jacobus Say (7 June 1625, page 264 of the next register), and the godparents of their first children. A "Joannes Say junior" or a "Maria Vereecken" among them would be the first record to put the Sleidinge couple beside the brothers.⁸
• Sleidinge, burials 1634-1653 (register 1608-1682, folios 46-94): read page by page for a burial of Joannes Say, to be certain the index missed none.
• Sleidinge, burials, folio 40, 26 July 1631: the burial of Margareta Vereecken, widow of Georgius Rogiers, which has only been seen in the index.
• Assenede, baptisms from October 1627, and the mixed register of Wachtebeke 1612-1647: the surviving registers around Sleidinge that have not yet been read in full for a baptism of Livinus Say.¹⁰

Further back: a DNA test

No paper reaches the Say family before Joannes Say the elder, born about 1560. Whether the Say families of Kluizen, Evergem, Zelzate, Desteldonk and Lochristi are one family with ours cannot be settled from records that no longer exist. A Y-DNA test of a male-line Say from one of those branches, compared with Jeroen Saeij's, would answer it in a way no archive can. If you are a Say, Saey or Saeij in the male line and your family comes from one of those villages, that comparison would be worth making.