Chapter 2. Joannes Saey and his two families, 1660 to 1719

A boy at Sleidinge

Joannes Saey was born at Sleidinge on 18 June 1660, at about two in the morning, and was carried to Sint-Joris two days later to be baptised.¹ He was the second child and the eldest son of Livinus Saij and Maria Van Kerrebrouck, and he grew up in a family that death visited often. He was four when his little brother Franciscus died, and twelve when, in the space of four months in 1673, his sister Jacoba died at fifteen and his sister Magdalena at three. A second Franciscus, born that same May, died in 1676.² Of seven children, three grew up: Joannes, his brother Livinus and his sister Maria.

He grew up, too, in a country at war. The peace signed at Münster in 1648 had ended the long war with the Dutch, but not the wars of the King of France. In the 1670s and again in the 1680s and 1690s the armies of Louis XIV marched through the southern Netherlands. They besieged Ghent in 1678 and 1684, destroyed the centre of Evergem in 1683, and in 1691, when Joannes was thirty, a French army camped at Doornzeledries and Kluizen, the next villages to the east, and burned much of the country around.³ His mother died on the Volpenswege on 13 October 1688. Joannes was twenty-eight.⁴

Livina De Munck, 1690

On 6 January 1690 Joannes came before the pastor of Sint-Joris with Livina De Munck and they were betrothed. The banns were read on the 6th, the 8th and the 15th of January, and on 4 February 1690 they were married, with Christianus Willems and Jacoba de Munck as witnesses. The pastor signed the entry himself.⁵

Joannes was twenty-nine. Livina was about twenty-five: she was forty when she died fifteen years later.⁶ The witness Jacoba de Munck was probably one of her family, and a Jacoba De Munck stood godmother to their first child the next year.⁷ Hers was a large family in the parish: the Sleidinge burials of the period include many De Muncks.⁸

Their first child, a son, was baptised on 20 April 1691. His godfather was his grandfather, old Livinus Saey, and he was named Livinus after him.⁷ There is a puzzle about this child. The burial register has a Livinus Say, son of Joannes, who was born on 13 April 1691 and died the next day, a day old.⁹ Either the dates in one of the two entries are wrong, or the baby baptised on 20 April was not the one who died on the 14th. The registers themselves would have to be read to settle it.

A daughter, Maria, followed on 8 August 1692, at four in the afternoon. Her godmother was Maria Saeys, almost certainly her aunt, Joannes's sister.¹⁰ Then came Joannes, born on 14 September 1696, who died on 22 November, not yet ten weeks old; Livina, born at one in the morning on 5 December 1697; and, after a gap of five years, another Livinus, born on the evening of 27 January 1703. His godfather was Livinus Slabbaert, who had married Joannes's sister Maria.¹⁰

In January 1699 Joannes's father died, in his seventy-second year. Six years later, on 18 January 1705, at five in the afternoon, Livina died on the Volpenswege, aged forty. The burial entry calls her the wife of Joannes Say.¹¹ A month later, on 20 February, his brother Livinus was buried too. He had never been able to fend for himself, and Joannes had kept him in his house for many years.¹² Joannes was left, at forty-four, a widower with young children.

Because the children were under age, the court of Evergem drew up an inventory of Livina's estate. It gives the one description we have of the family home: a farmstead with its house on the Volpenswege, the road on its west side and a little waterway, the vaardeken, on its east, with a barn and trees, and a field called "the four gemeten", not quite two hectares. When the brother died, Maria's husband gave up his share of it, because the keeping of Livinus had cost more than the property was worth.²⁹

Jacoba Kerckaert

He married again, and quickly. The marriage is not in the Sleidinge register, so it may have taken place in the bride's parish. But by the end of 1705 Jacoba Kerckaert was his wife: their first child was born on the night of 29 January 1706.¹³ Jacoba was about twenty-four, twenty years younger than her husband. She was the daughter of a Joannes Kerckaert.¹⁴ Two Kerckaert men who stood godfather to her children, Jacobus and Petrus, were probably her brothers, and a Petrus Kerckaert "from Evergem" married at Sleidinge in 1719. Her family may well have come from Evergem, the next parish to the south.¹⁵

That first child, a boy, was born at ten at night. The midwife baptised him during the birth, as the Church allowed when a baby's life was in danger. He died the next day, before he could be given a name in the register.¹³

Before the year was out there was another son. He was born on 8 December 1706, at about seven in the evening. The next day the vice-pastor, P. Verspreet, baptised him Joannes, with Joannes Kerckaert, probably his grandfather, and Joanna Kerrebrouck as godparents.¹⁶ He was the one who was to carry the family on, and chapter 3 is his.

A daughter, Joanna, followed on 28 March 1708. Like the brother who had died, she was baptised by the midwife during the birth.¹⁶

War and frost, 1708 to 1709

Those were not quiet years. The death of the last Spanish Habsburg king in 1700 had set off another European war, the War of the Spanish Succession, and once again the southern Netherlands were its battlefield. In July 1708 the French captured Ghent, gaining control of the waterways of Flanders. After his victory at Oudenaarde, the Duke of Marlborough came back in the winter. His army arrived before Ghent on 18 December 1708, and the town surrendered on 2 January 1709.¹⁷ On 19 October 1708, while the French held Ghent, Joannes and Livina's youngest son Livinus seems to have died on the Volpenswege, aged about five.¹⁸

The winter that followed was one of the coldest in European memory, the Great Frost of 1708 to 1709. In France the famine that came after it was estimated to have killed six hundred thousand people by the end of 1710.¹⁹ What it did to Sleidinge the parish registers do not say.

Seven more children

After the war the family grew again. Franciscus was born on 10 May 1710 at two in the afternoon. Livinus was born on a leap day, 29 February 1712, at seven in the morning, and his godfather was Livinus Neyt, the second husband of Joannes's sister Maria.²⁰ Anna Maria was born late on 28 April 1714 and, like her eldest brother, was baptised by the midwife during the birth. Her godfather was Jacobus Kerckaert. She lived fifteen months, and died on 31 July 1715.²⁰ Petrus was born at two in the morning on 18 January 1716, with Petrus Kerckaert as his godfather. Christophora, the last, was born at five in the afternoon on 30 October 1717.²⁰

The wars had ended in 1713 and 1714 with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt, by which the southern Netherlands passed from the Spanish Habsburgs to the Austrian ones. They became the Austrian Netherlands, and would remain so until the French armies came in 1794.²¹ After the recovery from Louis XIV's wars, the Austrian years brought a slow rise in prosperity to this part of Flanders, a growing population and farms divided into ever smaller holdings.³ In Sleidinge the weaving of linen became a household trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.²²

Spring 1719

Christophora died on 16 February 1719, at sixteen months.²³ Seven weeks later her father followed her. On 5 April 1719 the priest of Sint-Joris wrote:

5a Aprilis 1719 obijt Joannes Saey filius Livini maritus Jacobae Kerckhaert 58 annorum: "On 5 April 1719 died Joannes Saey, son of Livinus, husband of Jacoba Kerckhaert, aged fifty-eight." Beneath it he wrote the road where Joannes had lived: volpensweghe.²⁴ It is the entry that names his father, and it is what shows that the family in this history descends from Livinus Saij of Sleidinge. It does not descend from the Joannes Say and Barbara Baert of Destelbergen that the published family trees give him. Chapter 4 explains how that mistake arose.

The widow and the stepfather

Jacoba Kerckaert was left at thirty-eight with five young children. The inventory of Joannes's estate, drawn up in January 1720, lists them: Joannes, twelve; Joanna, eleven; Francis, ten and a half; Livinus, nine; and Petrus, four. From the first marriage, Livina was still a minor too, and her elder sister Marie was married to Jacobus Megron.³⁰ Three years later, on 11 June 1722, Jacoba married again, at Sint-Joris, to Cornelius Leuris. She died on 12 July 1743, aged sixty-two, living in the Wellinckstraat, still recorded as the daughter of Joannes, and now as the wife of Cornelius Leuris.²⁵ The street was not new: it appears in the Sleidinge records as Wellynck strate as early as 1445.²⁶

Cornelius seems to have taken his stepsons as his own: the register shows him standing by them as they married. He was a witness at the weddings of Joannes in 1734, of Franciscus in 1735, and of Petrus in 1739 and again in 1743.²⁷ Franciscus married Maria Martens; Livinus married Joanna Lippens in 1737, with his brother Joannes as witness; and Petrus married twice, first Anna Maria Van De Wattyne and then Livina Teirlinck, and died in 1757, aged forty-three.²⁷ And in April 1739, when Joannes and his wife brought their third son to be baptised, it was Jacoba Kerckaert, his grandmother, who stood godmother.²⁸