Chapter 1. Joannes Schaecht and Catharina de Vos, Tielt, 1660 to 1671

This chapter tells a probable story, not a proven one. The man it ends with - the Joannes baptised in 1663 - is the best candidate, and so far the only candidate, for the ancestor who died at Wingene in 1738. Chapter 9 weighs the evidence.

A town of weavers

Tielt was not a village but a small town, the seat of a castellany district, the Roede van Tielt, under the castellany of Kortrijk. Its wealth, such as it was, came from cloth: wool in the old centuries, and increasingly linen, spun and woven in the farmhouses of the countryside around and brought to the town's market.⁸ The seventeenth century had treated it brutally. The town lay on the road of every army that fought in Flanders, and the wars of Louis XIV, which began in 1667 with the War of Devolution, would send soldiers, requisitions and refugees through the Roede de Tielt for two generations.⁸ It was in this town, in the church of Saint Peter, that the Deschacht line first becomes visible.

It was an old town even then. Tielt had received its town charter in 1245 and built its cloth hall in 1275, and the tower of that hall still stood over the market when Joannes Schaecht came to be married.⁹ The town's memory was a hard one: in 1602, within living memory of the older people at the wedding, a woman of Tielt, Tanneke Sconyncx, had been accused of witchcraft and had died under torture.⁹ The engraver who drew Tielt for Antonius Sanderus's great description of Flanders, published in 1641, showed a few streets of houses and gardens strung along the roads to Brugge, Kortrijk and Ghent, the church, the hall and, everywhere around, orchards and fields.

The wedding of 1660

On 25 April 1660 Joannes Schaecht married Catharina de Vos in the church of Sint-Pieter at Tielt.¹ The priest wrote the groom's surname in a cramped hand that could be read Schaet or Schlet, but the baptisms that follow leave no doubt about it.

A year later, on 22 May 1661, the couple brought their first child to the font: Antonius, "son of Joannes Schaeck and Catharina de Vos". Joannes followed on 3 June 1663. He had been born on 20 May at four in the morning, and the clerk wrote his name in the margin as Jan Schaecht. Carolus was baptised on 8 February 1665 and Ester on 7 October 1666.²

Two households of the name

In May 1670 two more Schacht children were baptised at Tielt within a week. Petronilla, on 4 May, was the daughter of a Franciscus Schaeck and Arnolda vanden Bussche: a second household of the name, perhaps a brother of Joannes. Joanna, on 11 May, was the daughter of a Joannes Schaecht, but her mother is written Catharina E[..]arde, not de Vos.³ Either Catharina de Vos had died and Joannes had married again, or there were two men of the same name in the town.

The burial register now decides the question as far as a register can. The burials of 24 October 1664 to 28 December 1683 have been read in full: they hold no Schacht burial at all, and no Catharina de Vos - though other De Vos and Van Dierdonck burials are there to prove the register's reach. If Joannes had remarried before May 1670, Catharina must have died by about 1669; she did not die at Sint-Petrus. The Joanna of 1670, with her differently written mother, was therefore most likely the daughter of a second Joannes Schaecht, and our couple's marriage was probably still standing.¹⁰ The marriages of those years have not yet been read.

The Tielt baptisms were read name by name from September 1655 to June 1671, and in 1653 and 1654 as well. They hold no other Schacht child.⁴

The false date on the internet

The family tree online makes the next ancestor a Joannes baptised at Tielt on 28 May 1667. There is no such baptism. The whole of 1667 was read, and no Schacht child was born at Tielt that year.⁴ The tree's date may be a misreading of the entry of 1663, "born 20 May", but that cannot be checked against anything: it rests on nothing.

Which Joannes?

The Joannes who matters was buried at Wingene on 22 November 1738 as "husband of Maria van Dierendonck", and the priest gave his age as "about 84", which would put his birth about 1654.⁵ In the years that were read, Tielt baptised only one Joannes Schacht: the boy of 1663, who would have been seventy-five. Three things make him the man of Wingene, though no single record says so.

• His wife, Maria van Dierendonck, was "about 75" when she died in 1740, so she was born about 1665.⁵ A husband born in 1663 fits her better than one born in 1654.
• He married her at Tielt, not at Wingene, on 30 April 1692, and the witnesses were a Joannes and a Joanna Schaeght: most likely his father and a sister.⁶
• His sister Ester turns up at Wingene. On 16 April 1705 "Ester Schacht", wife of Bartholomeus de Clercq, had a son baptised there, nine days after Joannes and Maria van Dierendonck had their son Egidius baptised in the same church.⁷

Ages at burial were often overstated for the old: the priest who buried this man's grandson Emmanuel in 1782 added a dozen years to his age too (chapter 4). The link from the Joannes of Wingene back to Joannes Schaecht and Catharina de Vos is therefore grade C: probable, not proved. The papers of the Tielt orphan court survive on film and should settle it (chapter 9).