Chapter 2. Joannes Say the younger and Maria Vereecken, about 1588 to 1653

This is the second of the two probable chapters. It follows a son of the Destelbergen family to Sleidinge, into an old Sleidinge family called Vereecken, and argues that his youngest son was Livinus Saij, with whom the proven line begins in chapter 3. The evidence for each step is set out, the evidence against it too, and the chapter ends with the documents that would settle the question and where they are.

A baptism at Destelbergen, April 1612

On page 46 of the Destelbergen register, under the heading Aprilis, the priest wrote in 1612:

Baptisata est hac 15 Aprilis 1612 Livina filia Joannis Sey junioris et Mariae Verheecke coniugum; susceptoribus Egidio Goethals et Livina Sey: "On this 15 April 1612 was baptised Livina, daughter of Joannes Sey the younger and Maria Verheecke, a married couple; godparents Egidius Goethals and Livina Sey."¹

Three things in that line matter. The father is Joannes Sey junior, the younger: the son, as chapter 1 argued, of the Joannes Say senior who was buried in the same village in 1621, and of Livina Buyle. His wife is a Maria Verheecke: the priest wrote her name with the stroke over the V that stands for er, and the vowel is at the limit of what the microfilm shows, but the nineteenth-century clerk who indexed the register from the original read it Verheecken, and Verheeken is exactly how the priest of Sleidinge would write the same woman's name at her burial seventeen years later. And the child is a Livina, named, if the reading of the godmother is right, after a Livina Sey who held her at the font, and in any case after her grandmother Livina Buyle.

No other Joannes Say with a wife Maria Vereecken is known anywhere in the country around Ghent. Two years after this baptism the couple is at Sleidinge, fourteen kilometres to the north-west, and the rest of this chapter is their story there. That the two couples are one is the first inference of the chapter. It rests on the two names, the same abbreviated spelling of the second, the dates, and the older Joannes Say who turns up at a Sleidinge font in 1615. No record says "Joannes Say of Destelbergen" at Sleidinge, or "of Sleidinge" at Destelbergen.

A funeral and a wedding at Sleidinge, 1614

The first trace of the family at Sleidinge is a small grave. On 4 February 1614 the priest of Sint-Joris buried Marg[areta] filiola Joannis Saij, "the little daughter of Joannes Saij". The index of the register calls her only kind, a child; the priest wrote her name, shortened.² Four months later, on 14 June 1614, a young couple were married at Sint-Joris, Jaecques Burreme and Stoffelijntken Vereecken, and the priest wrote down two witnesses: the wife of a Georgius Vereecken, and Joannes Saij.³

A man stood witness at a wedding because he was kin or a close friend. Stoffelijntken was a Vereecken, and so was Joannes's wife. Where Joannes and Maria themselves had married is not known. It was not at Destelbergen, whose marriage register begins in 1600 and has no Say wedding before 1618, and not at Sleidinge, whose register runs from 1608 without a gap and has none either; so it was in a third parish, or before 1608.⁴ Maria's family lived at Sleidinge, and Sleidinge is where the couple settled.

Maria's family

The Vereeckens were an old Sleidinge family. In the court papers the name is written van der Eecken, "of the oak", which is what Vereecken means, and it goes back in the parish to a Joris Vereecke who was dead by 1543, leaving three small children and land in Sleidinge-Keure held undivided with a Jan and a Stoffelijne Vereecke.⁵ Two generations later the head of the family was another Jooris Vereecken, who was buried at Sleidinge on 14 September 1608, on the first page of the burial register. Two of his children are named in the records as his: a son Joos, who married Christina de Roo, and a daughter Cornelie, wife of Pieter Goethals, whose estate was inventoried in January 1617 with "Joos Vereecken, son of Jooris" as one of the guardians.⁶ Two more were probably his: a Cornelis, buried in October 1617, who had married first Lievine Steenbeke and then Betken Hecstel; and a Margriete, wife of Joris Rogiers, buried in 1631, whose grandchildren had a "Jan Vereecke, son of Cornelis" as their guardian.⁷

Maria, Joannes Say's wife, was a granddaughter of this Jooris. Which of his sons was her father cannot yet be said, and the two candidates have each been looked at.

Joos Vereecken. 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. Its published summary names the young children Cornelis, Hans and Betken, a son Christoffel who acted as guardian, and "also children of the deceased" a married daughter Joorijntken, wife of Pauwels de Brabanter, and a son Jooris.⁸ Several of these people stand around Joannes and Maria: a Cornelius Vereecken was godfather to their daughter Maria in 1623; Betken, married to Geeraert Willems in October 1626, was godmother to their daughter Elisabeth six months later, and a later inventory calls her "Elisabeth van der Eecken, daughter of Joos"; and Joos's family owned a farmstead on the Volpenswege, the road where Livinus would live all his married life, which his heirs still held undivided in 1661.⁹

The summary of 1620 does not name Maria, and an online family tree that makes her a daughter of Joos and Christina has no source for it.¹⁰ But the summary is not a complete list of Joos's children either: it names Christoffel only as a guardian and not among "the children of the deceased", although he was Joos's son, born about 1590. Joos himself was born about 1560 and could have had a first wife before Christina; a Maria born in the early 1590s, and a Christoffel, would fit such a marriage, and neither would be an heir of Christina de Roo.

The registers also show what became of Joorijntken, whom the priest wrote in Latin as Georgia. She married Paulus de Brabanter in September 1610; her first son was baptised on 8 April 1614 and named Judocus, after her father, and Judocus Ver Eecke himself stood godfather. The boy died two months later. Four more children followed, another Judocus in 1615, Zegerus in 1618, Paulus in 1621 and Anna, baptised on 22 February 1626; eight weeks after that last baptism, on 18 April 1626, Georgia was buried. Her brother Christoffel outlived them all and died in 1672, "son of Judocus", at eighty-two.¹¹

Cornelis Vereecken. The inventory made in 1618 for the young children of the Cornelis who was buried in October 1617 mentions, in passing, "Maeyken Vereeken, half-sister of the orphans", his grown daughter by his first wife Lievine Steenbeke.¹² A Maeyken old enough in 1618 to be named on her own could be Maria. Against it: the summary names her without a husband, where that of 1620 is careful to give Joorijntken hers, and Maria had been Joannes Say's wife for at least six years by then. Cornelis's household did supply Joannes's second wife's mother, as the next section shows, so the two branches were close in any case.

On balance Joos is the likelier father, by a first marriage. But the point that matters for Livinus does not depend on the choice: by either road Maria was a granddaughter of Jooris Vereecken, and so was Stoffelijntken, the bride of 1614, and so were the Rogiers children of the next section. Land that came down from Jooris would be shared among all of them.

The children

Joannes and Maria brought at least seven children to the font, one at Destelbergen and six at Sint-Joris, and buried most of them.¹³

• Livina, baptised at Destelbergen on 15 April 1612. Nothing more is known of her; the unnamed daughter of Joannes Say buried at Sleidinge in August 1622 may be her.
• Margareta, the little daughter 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, and this is Joannes senior of Destelbergen, alive until 1621, standing for his son's first Sleidinge child. 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.
• Maria, baptised on 3 October 1623.
• Elisabeth, born at eleven in the morning on 12 April 1627. She was probably the Elisabeth Say, daughter of Joannes, buried on 22 July 1631 in the part of the burial book kept for children.

And, if the argument of this chapter is right, a son: Livinus, born between 1625 and 1629, whose baptism has not been found.

Maria took her part in the life of the parish: in October 1624 "Maria, wife of Joannes Say" stood godmother to a son of Sacharias Verhelst and Joanna Basselaers, whose wife had stood for her daughter the year before.¹⁴

The godparents, and what they say about Joannes

Look at who held Joannes's children at the font, and one thing stands out: apart from his own father in 1615, not one of them was a Say. They were Elisabeth, wife of Georgius de Backere; Joannes van Quakebeke and Petronilla, daughter of Joannes Goethals; Joannes Gheernaert and Anna, wife of Georgius Rogiers; Cornelius Vereecken and the wife of Zacharias Verhelst; Christophorus Hannaert and Elisabeth Vereecken, wife of Gerardus Willems. Every one of them who can be placed belongs to the Vereecken clan or to families married into it. Pieter Goethals, the widower of Maria's aunt Cornelie, was the guardian of Joos's children in 1620 and later married a de Roo; his kinsman Jan Goethals had a Vereecken as guardian of his own children, and it was Jan's daughter Petronilla who stood for the boy Joannes in 1617.¹⁵ Anna, the wife of Georgius Rogiers, was the sister-in-law of the woman Joannes would marry in 1629. This is the pattern of a man who had married into a large Sleidinge family and had no kin of his own in the parish: an incomer, which is what a son of Destelbergen would be.

1629

Maria Vereecken died in the late summer of 1629 and was buried on 6 September: Maria Verheeken uxor Joannis Say.¹⁶

Joannes did not stay a widower for long. Seven weeks later, on 29 October 1629, he married Elisabeth Rogiers at Sint-Joris, and the first of his two witnesses was Jacobus Burreme, the man at whose wedding he had stood fifteen years before.¹⁷ Elisabeth was no stranger to the family he had married into. Her mother was Margriete Vereecken, the widow of Joris Rogiers, buried at Sleidinge in July 1631; when Margriete's grandchildren were given guardians in 1632, the court chose "Jan Vereecke, son of Cornelis", her brother's son. Georgius Rogiers, whose wife had stood godmother to Anna Say in 1620, was Elisabeth's brother.¹⁸ Joannes's second wife was, in all likelihood, a first cousin of his first.

With Elisabeth 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, with Petrus Goethals as godfather; and Maria, born on 15 January 1634.¹⁹ The name of the first of them is worth a moment. Livina was not the name of either godparent; it was the name of the first daughter of Joannes's first marriage, and of his mother at Destelbergen, who had died three years before. In 1630 and 1631 Elisabeth stood godmother twice, and Joannes once.²⁰

After 1634

After January 1634 the family vanishes from the Sleidinge registers. No Joannes Say was buried at Sleidinge in the whole of the seventeenth century, and no estate inventory was drawn up for him in either of the courts that served the parish, although his youngest children were still minors into the 1650s and such an inventory was the rule where there was property. Elisabeth Rogiers stood at no more fonts after 1634. She was buried at Sleidinge on 17 January 1653, "widow of Joannes Say".²¹ The simplest reading is that the household left the parish in the mid-1630s, that Joannes died elsewhere between 1634 and 1653, and that his widow came back, or came to die, at Sleidinge. The children of both marriages, Anna, Maria, Petrus and the younger Maria, do not appear again at Sleidinge as brides, grooms, godparents or burials.

For more than twenty years, from 1634 until the wedding of 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, from the Assenede district, as chapter 6 shows.

Livinus, their son?

Livinus Saij, with whom the proven line begins, married at Sleidinge in November 1655 and lived on the Volpenswege until his death in January 1699. Nothing in his own records names his parents except one word: the court of Evergem, in the inventories drawn up at his wife's death and at his own, called him twice "Lieven Saeij fs Jan", Lieven, son of Jan.²² Six things point from that Jan to Joannes Say the younger.

1. He is the only Jan. Joannes Say is the only Jan Say known to have lived at Sleidinge in the years when Livinus was born. The one other Jan Say of the neighbourhood, Jan Say of Kluizen, five kilometres away, had a son Lieven of his own, who lived at Ertvelde and died in 1678, and whose family never once appears beside ours.²³
2. The division of 1659. Livinus's own inventory refers to a division of property made on 10 April 1659 between him and "the heirs of Jaecques Burrens". 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 Burme", in March 1657.²⁴ 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. Christophora and Maria were both granddaughters of Jooris Vereecken, sisters or cousins; a son of Maria would hold his share of the old man's land alongside Christophora's children, to be divided when that generation was gone. A second Burme brother, Jan, married a second Stoffelijntken Vereecken, a daughter of Cornelis, in 1622; the two families were bound twice over.²⁵
3. The Volpenswege. Livinus lived and died on the road where Joos Vereecken's family had its farmstead. In the late 1640s Joos's sons Jooris and Cornelis sold an unhoused farmstead and land there to a Pieter Dielmans; in 1661 another farmstead on the road was still held undivided with Cornelis; and in 1690 Cornelis's daughter Cornelia died on the Volpenswege, the wife of Andries van de Voorde, whose kinswoman Barbara had held Livinus's daughter Maria at the font in 1667.²⁶ Livinus settled among Joos Vereecken's grandchildren.
4. The godparents. The families who stood for Livinus's children were the families who had stood for the Burreme and Say children forty years before: Margareta Steenbeke, godmother to a Burreme boy in 1624, was godmother to Livinus's first son in 1660; Joannes Mersman, whose wife Anna Burrens was very probably Jaecques's daughter Joanna of 1617, was godfather to Livinus's Maria in 1667; the De Wildes, godparents to two Burreme children, were godmothers to two of Livinus's, and in 1663 Livinus himself stood godfather to a daughter of Petrus De Wilde and Margareta Verhelst, of the same Verhelst family that had exchanged godparents with Joannes and Maria in 1623 and 1624.²⁷
5. The names. Livinus and Maria van Kerrebrouck called their first son Joannes and their second daughter Maria, as custom directed for a paternal grandfather Jan and a paternal grandmother Maria. Livinus's own name had been in the family since the Lieven Sey and the two Vijnkens of Destelbergen, and his sister of 1612 bore it.
6. The dates. Livinus was born, by his age at death, between January 1627 and January 1628. If the age was exact he was born within nine months of his sister Elisabeth, which is possible but unlikely; if it was a year or two high, as ages at death often were, he falls into the three-and-a-half-year gap between Maria's children of October 1623 and April 1627, where a child is missing. And Livina Buyle, his grandmother if all this is right, died in July 1627, in the very months a child was given her name in its masculine form.

Why it is not proven

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

• No baptism. All three of Sleidinge's baptism books for the 1620s have been read, two of them entry by entry on the archive's images, with known Say baptisms as controls to show that the name would be recognised; there is no Livinus Say.²⁸ The surviving registers of every parish around Sleidinge were read for the months around his birth, Zelzate, Desteldonk, Wondelgem, Lembeke, Kaprijke, Mariakerke and Drongen, with the same result. In eight parishes the baptisms of those years are lost: Evergem, Ertvelde, Oosteeklo, Vinderhoute, Merendree, Landegem, Bassevelde and Doornzele. Evergem is the one that matters most; it bordered the Volpenswege, its court handled Livinus's estate, and if he was baptised there the record is gone.²⁹
• The dates are tight, as point 6 admits.
• No record names Maria's father, and the sisterhood or cousinhood of Maria and Christophora Vereecken rests on the shared grandfather, not on a document that says so. The division of 1659 could, in principle, have been a sale.

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

What would make this certain, and how you can help

The documents that would decide it are all in one building, the Rijksarchief Gent at Bagattenstraat 43 in Ghent, whose opening hours and reservation rule are given at the end of chapter 1. None of them is online or indexed by name; they have to be turned over by hand, and the archive can also supply scans of an item whose number is known.³⁰

1. The deed of 10 April 1659, the division between Lieven Saeij and the heirs of Jaecques Burrens. It is in the fonds Graafschap Evergem (AR48). The likeliest places are the court's day-books, items 669 (1657-1659) and 670 (1659-1660), around April 1659; the bundle of estate papers no. 269 (1657-1659); the register no. 230 (1648-1660); or the series of inheritances and property transfers for 1656-1659 (items 450-527). If the deed says the land came to Livinus van moederswege, from his mother's side, or names Maria Vereecken or Jan Say, the question is answered.
2. The original inventory of 1620 for the children of Joos van der Eecken and Christina de Roo, AR48 bundle 265 (Neyt, vol. VI, no. 22): the full list of heirs. If it names "Jan Say" as the husband of a daughter Maeyken, Maria's parentage is settled; if it lists the children of a first marriage, likewise.
3. The original of the sale of the late 1640s by Jooris and Cornelis van der Eecke, sons of Joos, of a farmstead on the Volpenswege (Neyt, vol. VII, no. 461, folio 107 of the register it abstracts): the published abstract is marked incomplete, and the full act may list every heir with a share, Livinus or his sisters among them.
4. The original of the inventory of 1618 for the children of Cornelis Vereecken, AR48 (Neyt, vol. VII, no. 345, folio 310v), which names "Maeyken Vereeken, half-sister of the orphans": the full text may give her husband.
5. The Keure van Sleidinge (fonds AR172), the other court of the parish, for any estate paper of Jacobus Burrens (died 1652) or Christophora Vereecken (died 1657) that lists their co-heirs.

A photograph of the relevant pages, with the item number and the folio, is all that is needed. Two smaller things can be done from home, on AGATHA or FamilySearch: read the Sleidinge burials of 1634 to 1653 page by page, to be certain that no burial of Joannes Say was missed by the index; and read the burial of Margareta Vereecken, widow of Georgius Rogiers, of 26 July 1631, which has not yet been seen on the register.

If the question is answered, the line reaches back one more step on Maria's side, to Jooris Vereecken, buried in 1608, and to the Joris Vereecke of 1543, and the Say line stands on the two Destelbergen generations of chapter 1.