Chapter 4. Where did Livinus come from?

A man without a past

Every family history has a first page, and ours is an autumn day at Sint-Joris in 1655. On 12 October of that year Livinus Saij and Maria Kerbrock were betrothed before the pastor, and on 21 November they were married.¹ From that day on the family can be followed from record to record, father to son, for nine generations. Before it there is nothing. The entry gives no parents for either of them and no parish of origin. Livinus was about twenty-eight. He had been born some time in the twelve months before January 1628, if the priest who buried him in 1699 had his age right.² Where and to whom, no record yet found says.

This chapter is about that blank. It explains why the published family trees fill it in wrongly, what the registers rule out, and what is left.

The family tree that went to Destelbergen

For years the family trees on Ancestry, FamilySearch and Geneanet, the family's own among them, carried the line three generations further back than this history does. Their ancestors lived at Destelbergen, on the far side of Ghent, about fourteen kilometres south-east of Sleidinge: a Joannes Say who married Livina Buyle; their son Jacobus, who married Anna Schatteman; and their son Joannes, baptised on 31 January 1627, who married Barbara Baert at Destelbergen on 14 October 1651. That Joannes and Barbara, the trees said, were the parents of Joannes Saey of Sleidinge, who died in 1719.³

The Destelbergen families were real. Their baptisms and marriages stand in the old indexes of the Destelbergen registers, and Say was a common name there.⁴ Joannes Say and Barbara Baert did have a son called Joannes. But he was baptised at Destelbergen on 8 December 1661, and the trees give their Joannes the Sleidinge birth date of 18 June 1660 and the Sleidinge death of 1719. Somewhere along the way two boys of the same name and nearly the same age were taken for one person. After that, the error was copied from tree to tree.⁵

The Sleidinge registers undo the link, and they do it twice. The baptism of 1660 calls the child "son of Livinus Saij and Maria Kerrebrouck". The burial of 1719 calls the dead man "son of Livinus". Both entries have been read in the original.⁶ And the two families lived their lives side by side, in two parishes, in the same years:

One man cannot have been the husband of both women.⁷

There is a strange coincidence in this. The Destelbergen Joannes was baptised on 31 January 1627, and our Livinus was born within the same year or so. When the two dates were first put side by side, it looked for a moment like a clue. It is not. Every Sleidinge record, from the wedding in 1655 to the son's burial in 1719, calls our man Livinus; the Destelbergen index has only a Joannes on that day, and no second boy; and the two men were raising families fourteen kilometres apart at the same time.⁸

Not baptised at Sleidinge

If Livinus was not from Destelbergen, the obvious place to look for his baptism is Sleidinge itself. Two separate baptism books survive there for the 1620s, overlapping in their years. The first has been indexed name by name, and it has no Livinus Say.⁹ The second has not been indexed, and so for this history it was read on screen, entry by entry, from August 1623 to May 1627: nearly four years of baptisms in Latin.

To be sure the name would be recognised when it came, the search was tested on two entries already known from the index. Both were found where they should be: the baptism of Maria Say on 3 October 1623, and of her sister Elisabeth on 18 April 1627.

Baptisata Elisabetha filia Joannis Say et Maria [Vereecken] … nata 12a Aprilis 1627 hora undecima ante meridiem: "Baptised Elisabetha, daughter of Joannes Say and Maria (Vereecken), born on 12 April 1627 at eleven in the morning." Between those two entries, and in the weeks after, there is no Livinus.¹⁰ The indexes of the neighbouring parishes of Lovendegem, Waarschoot and Zomergem, and of the east-Ghent parishes of Destelbergen, Oostakker and Lochristi, have no Livinus Say born in the 1620s either.¹¹

The Says of Sleidinge in the 1620s

The two sisters in that test belonged to the only Say family in the Sleidinge registers of those years. Joannes Say and Maria Vereecken had children baptised at Sint-Joris in 1615, 1617, 1620, 1623 and 1627. It was a family that death visited often: the burial register has a child of Joannes Say in 1614, a son Joannes in 1619, a daughter in 1622 and Joanna in 1626. Maria Vereecken died on 6 September 1629. Seven weeks later, on 29 October, Joannes married again, to Elisabeth Rogiers, and had three more children with her between 1630 and 1634. Elisabeth was a widow when she died in January 1653.¹² After 1634 there is not a single Say baptism at Sleidinge until Livinus's first child in 1658.

Was Livinus a son of this Joannes? It would be the neatest answer, and it was the first lead this research followed. But the dates are against it. Elisabeth was born in April 1627, and Livinus between January 1627 and January 1628. The only way both can be true is if Livinus was born in the first three weeks of January 1628, and the indexed baptism book has no such entry. If the age at his burial was more than a year out, the window widens, but the indexed book has no Livinus Say in any year from 1612 to 1640, and the second book has none in the years that were read. It is possible that he was a son of Joannes, born and baptised elsewhere. Nothing in the church registers shows it.¹³ But the estate inventories, as the end of this chapter shows, point back to this family, and the chapter "Before the line" at the start of this history tells its story as the most likely answer.

The other Livinus Saij, 1645

The Sleidinge marriage register holds one more surprise. Ten years before our Livinus's wedding, another Livinus Saij was married at Sint-Joris:

Vigesima tertia Septembris 1645 affidati sunt Livinus Saij et Judoca Teerlinck. Juncti sunt matrimonio decima quinta Octobris 1645 coram testibus Nicolao Saij et Joanne Dhont: "On 23 September 1645 Livinus Saij and Judoca Teerlinck were betrothed. They were married on 15 October 1645, before the witnesses Nicolaus Saij and Joannes Dhont."¹⁴

Could this have been our man, married young, widowed, and married again in 1655? For a while it seemed possible. The answer came from Kluizen, the next village to the north-east, and from the estate inventories of the district of Assenede, to which Kluizen belonged. On 27 February 1657 the estate of Jan Say, who had died at Kluizen, was inventoried. His widow was Elisabeth Haverbeke, and seven children were listed, all of age: Niclays, Lieven, Mayken, Tanneken, Andrisijne, Betken and Guilliaeme.¹⁵

Here were a Lieven and a Niclays, brothers, the same pair of names as the groom and the first witness of 1645. And the same papers show what became of this Lieven. As "Lieven Saey, son of Jan" he acted as guardian for the orphaned children of his brothers and sisters from 1652 onwards, the last time in October 1676. By 1681 his brother Niclays had taken his place. That fits the Lieven Say of Ertvelde, a little further to the north-east, who died in 1678 and whose own orphans were given Niclays as their guardian. Our Livinus was alive in Sleidinge until 1699.¹⁶

For a while this seemed to settle who the groom of 1645 was: the Kluizen Lieven, later of Ertvelde. A later search showed that it was simpler than that. In July 1648 the court of the Ambacht Boekhoute drew up the inventory of a "Lieven SAEY" whose widow was "Joosijne TERLYNCX", with two young children, and whose guardian was a Niclaeys Saey. The groom of 1645 had died within three years of his wedding.²³ He was neither the Kluizen Lieven, who lived until the 1670s, nor ours.

It is in the papers of this same family that the burning of a farmstead by French troops on 13 April 1676 is mentioned, as chapter 1 told.¹⁷ And the inventories show how thick on the ground Lieven Saeys were in those parishes. In the second half of the seventeenth century there were at least five within about fifteen kilometres of Sleidinge: at Ertvelde, at Zelzate, at Kluizen, at Oostakker, and ours.¹⁸

A clue from 1659

Livinus's own estate inventory, drawn up in February 1699, mentions an older document: a division of property made on 10 April 1659 between him and "the heirs of Jaecques Burrens".²¹ The Sleidinge registers show who that man was.

• Jaecques Burreme married Stoffelijntken (Christophora) Vereecken at Sint-Joris on 14 June 1614. There were two witnesses. One was the wife of a Georgius Vereecken. The other was Joannes Saij.
• They had at least seven children between 1615 and 1630. Jacobus died on 2 October 1652, and Christophora, "widow of Jacobus Burmer", on 24 March 1657. The division with his heirs came two years later, when the couple's estate was being settled.
• The two families kept close. Anna Burrens, very probably their daughter Joanna of 1617, married Joannes Meersman, and a Joannes Mersman stood godfather to Livinus's daughter Maria in 1667. Margareta Steenbeke, godmother to a Burrem boy in 1624, was godmother to Livinus's first son in 1660. And in 1679 Livinus's son Jan stood godfather to a Meersman child.²²

A division of property is made between people who own it together, most often co-heirs of the same family. The simplest reading of all this is that Christophora Vereecken, wife of Jaecques Burrens, and Maria Vereecken, wife of Joannes Say, were sisters. Joannes Say then stood witness at his sister-in-law's wedding in 1614, and a son of Maria would hold a share of Vereecken family land together with the Burrens, to be divided once that generation had died. That son would be Livinus. He would then be, after all, the son of Joannes Say and Maria Vereecken, born about 1628, a year before his mother died. It would also fit his name "Lieven fs Jan".

It is a hypothesis, not a proof. The Sleidinge baptism book for 1628 is complete, with baptisms in every month, and it has no Livinus Say. Nothing shows that the two Vereecken women were sisters, because their own baptisms are older than the registers, and Vereecken was a common name in the parish. The division of 1659 could also have been a sale. But it is the first piece of evidence that connects Livinus to anyone of an older generation, and it points to the one Say family that was living in Sleidinge when he was born. The original deed of 1659, if it survives in the archive of the Graafschap Evergem, may settle it.

What is left

So the question stays open, though it has narrowed. What the records do show can be put briefly: - His father was called Jan. The inventory of Maria's estate, completed in July 1689, names the widower as "Lieven Saeij fs Jan", Lieven, son of Jan.²⁰ That fits the name the couple gave their first son, Joannes, in 1660. - Livinus Saij was not the son of the Destelbergen family the trees give him. - He was probably not the Lieven, son of Jan Say, of Kluizen and Ertvelde, although that conclusion rests on an argument from the guardianships, and the new evidence that our Livinus was also a son of a Jan is a reason to look at it again. - He was not baptised at Sleidinge in the years his age points to, nor, as far as the indexes go, in the parishes around. - In 1659 he divided property with the heirs of Jaecques Burrens, whose wife was a Vereecken. That makes the Sleidinge family of Joannes Say and Maria Vereecken the most likely one, though it is not proven.

Four lines of enquiry remain. - The deed of 1659. The division between Livinus and the Burrens heirs, and the estate papers of Jacobus Burrens (died 1652) and Christophora Vereecken (died 1657), in the Graafschap Evergem archive at the State Archives in Ghent. If the property came from the Vereecken side, these papers should say so. - The Kluizen family. Kluizen lies less than five kilometres from Sleidinge. A cousin or nephew of Jan Say's children would be at home in the district, and the Says of Kluizen and of Sleidinge both married Vereecken women. But no record links Livinus to them. Kluizen's own registers begin only in 1641, too late to hold his baptism.¹⁹ - The papers left at death. Maria's estate inventory has been found, but only in a published summary. The guardian on the father's side turned out to be her own son Jan, not one of Livinus's brothers or cousins, so it names no older Saey. The original, in the State Archives in Ghent, may say more about the house, the land and the debts, and perhaps where the family's property came from.²⁰ - The unindexed parishes. For several parishes around Sleidinge no index of the baptisms of the 1620s exists. They could be read page by page, as the second Sleidinge book was.

Until one of these gives an answer, the line of this family begins with a man of about twenty-eight standing before the pastor of Sint-Joris on 12 October 1655. The Say families east of Ghent, at Destelbergen, Oostakker and Lochristi, and the Saeys of Kluizen may well be distant kin. They are described in chapter 5, with a drawn tree for each family. But they are not, on present evidence, ancestors.