Appendix. What you can go and see

Everything in this history happened within an hour's drive of Ghent, and almost all of it is still standing, still walkable, or still on a shelf in an archive. This appendix is for anyone who wants to go. It has two halves: the places, and the papers nobody has read yet.

The places

Sleidinge, the first two hundred years

The church of Sint-Joris, Sleidinge (Evergem). Dorpsstraat. The spire, from about 1260, is called de Sleidingse Naald, the Sleidinge Needle. Livinus and Maria were married here on 21 November 1655, and the nine generations of this history begin in that building.

Inside is the thing worth going for: the font of coloured marble, cut in 1663 by the Ghent master Jacques Cot. Joannes, born in 1660, was christened at the font it replaced. His younger brothers and sisters — Maria in 1667, Magdalena in 1670, Franciscus in 1673 — were held over this one. So were his own children and grandchildren, down to Bernardus in 1748. If you put your hand on the rim of that basin you are touching the one object in this book that five generations of the family certainly touched.

Four years before it was installed, in 1659, the relics of Saint Godelieve came here from the Klein Begijnhof in Ghent, and her cult overtook Saint George's. That is why the registers are catalogued as Sint-Joris en Sint-Godelieve.¹

The Volpenswege. A long road running north along the eastern edge of the parish towards Oosteeklo; it still has the name. The registers put the family here from 1688 to 1744, and Livinus died here in January 1699. The old name is older than that: Volponds weghe, 1361. In the seventeenth century the house stood with the road on its west side and a small waterway, the vaardeken, on its east, with a barn, trees and a field called "the four gemeten", not quite two hectares. No number survives, so no one can point at a door. Walk the road instead.

The Wellinckstraat, first written Wellynck strate in 1445. Jacoba Kerckaert, the widow who remarried and brought up the third generation, died here on 12 July 1743.

Kaprijke and Bassevelde, the border years

The Dries at Kaprijke, the green at the centre of the old town. Bernardus, the last of the Sleidinge-born line, died somewhere in this parish on 18 April 1809, a seller of gin. His daughter Bernardina Coleta was married in 1800 in what the act calls the Tempel van de Wet, the Temple of the Law, at the seat of the canton — the town hall of the Republic.

The Landsdijk, north of Bassevelde, on the old Graaf Jansdijk. A raised road through the polders now, but it was built as a sea dyke, probably at the end of the thirteenth century, to hold back the Braakman. Bernardus Saey died here in November 1861 and his widow Marie Therese in September 1870. Their daughter Amelia was born in 1848 "in his house on the Dyk here, section J number 72"; on the Popp cadastral map that parcel lies by the junction at the canal, about a kilometre and a half north-west of the village church, and the street there is still called the Landsdijk.

Boekhoute and Philippine, a few kilometres north. Both were ports on the Braakman, the sea inlet that drowned fifteen villages and was finally dammed in June 1952. Stand on the dyke and you are standing on the reason the dyke exists.

Two manors at Wippelgem

Goed ten Hulle, now the castle of Wippelgem, and Goed ten Broeke, a few fields away, both in Wippelgem (Evergem). Neither has anything to do with this family, and that is exactly why they are worth seeing. Ten Broeke belonged to the Ghent patrician family Borluut from the thirteenth century and was turned in 1531 into a huys van plaisance with a dovecote of two hundred and twenty nesting boxes; Ten Hulle is first named in 1375, in the hands of the Ghent patrician Sander Cante. While the Saeys were working other men's land by the day, this is who owned the country around them. The Ten Hulle estate has belonged to the municipality of Evergem since 2008 and its park is open.²

Zeeland

IJzendijke. Eduardus married here in the council chamber on 17 August 1878, and his son Pieter Johannes was born in the house at ward B, number 24. Oostburg, where Achille was born in 1915 at Sint Baafsgang number five, was eighty per cent destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt to a new plan, so the lane is gone.

The cemetery on the Mauritsweg, IJzendijke. Grave 411870. Achille E. Saeij, ✶ 20-5-1915, † 13-6-2002, and below two linked rings, Irma S. de Paepe. This is where the history ends.

The papers

Four questions in this book are still open, and the documents that could answer them are in one reading room: the State Archives in Ghent (Rijksarchief Gent), which holds the archive of the Graafschap Evergem, inventory AR48. None of these has been digitised, and as far as we know nobody has read them for this family. A reader's card is free; order the items in advance.

1. The deed of 10 April 1659 — the most important document in this book. Livinus's own estate inventory of 1699 mentions a division of property made that day between him and "the heirs of Jaecques Burrens", whose wife was a Vereecken. If that deed says the land came to Livinus from his mother's side, or names Maria Vereecken, then the chapter "Before the line" stops being probable and becomes proven, and the family goes back another generation. There is no bundle for 1656–1659 in the published series, so ask for: - the ferieboeken (day-books) of the court of Evergem, nos. 669 (1657–1659) and 670 (1659–1660), around April 1659; - the bundle of estate papers and divisions no. 269 (1657–1659); - register no. 230 (1648–1660).

2. The originals of the five estate inventories, of which we have only the published summaries. The originals often give the house, the land, the debts and the neighbours: - Maria Van Kerrebrouck, 13 July 1689 — bundle 281 - Livinus Saeij fs Jan, 11 February 1699 — bundle 285 - Livina de Muijnck, 9 June 1706 — bundle 289 - Jan Saij fs Lieven, 10 January 1720 — bundle 301 - Jan Saij fs Jan, 1 July 1767 — bundle 348

3. Joos Vereecken's estate, 29 July 1620 — bundle 265. The published summary names only some of the children. The question is simple: is there a Maria among them? If there is, Livinus's mother is identified.

4. Joosijntken van Hyfte. In the estate of Pieter Saey of Kluizen, 23 February 1644 — Ambacht Assenede, register 1033, folio 175v. One line would settle it: does the original call his first wife fa Christoffels, daughter of Christoffel? If it does, the Evergem and Kluizen families are joined.

Optional, if the first four go well: the ommestellingen (tax assessments) of Sleidinge-Sint-Baafs, no. 95bis, from 1635, and the land registers 67 (1619–1655) and 68 (1651). These list who held which parcel. If a Say or a Vereecken appears on the Volpenswege before 1655, that is the answer to where Livinus came from, from the other direction.

A note on what to expect. These are seventeenth-century Flemish court hands, and a page can take an hour. Nobody needs to transcribe everything: a photograph of each page is enough, and the reading can be done afterwards. The finding that mattered most in this history — that Joannes of 1706 is the man buried in 1767 — came out of one badly-spelled line in a register that had been sitting unread because the priest wrote the name with a Z.