Chapter 2. Joannes Deschacht and Maria van Dierendonck, Wingene, 1692 to 1740

A widower marries at Tielt

Joannes Deschacht had been married before. On 11 February 1690 Wingene buried "Elizabetha Naessens, wife of Joannes Schaeght", in the twenty-sixth year of her age, so born about 1664.¹ Where he had married her is not known: the Tielt marriage registers of 1684 and 1685 are missing, and no other parish has yielded the act.

Two years later, after three banns, he married Maria van Dierendonck at Tielt, on 30 April 1692. The witnesses were a Joannes and a Joanna Schaeght - most likely his father and a sister.²

Wingene

The couple settled at Wingene, a big farming parish halfway between Tielt and Brugge, on the sandy plateau where rye, flax and heath met. Like the whole countryside of the Roede van Tielt, it lived from its farms and from the linen its households spun and wove in winter.⁸ The young family's years there were war years again - the Nine Years' War to 1697, then from 1701 the War of the Spanish Succession - with armies wintering and foraging across the castellany of Kortrijk until the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.⁸

The parish was ruled from its castles. The lordship of Wingene belonged to the Grammez and later the van Haveskercke families, and on the edge of the parish stood De Wildenburg, the moated house of the noble family Wyts, who held it for more than two centuries.⁹ It is the grandest picture of the parish to survive from these years: a red-brick house behind its moat, with an avenue of trees, a kitchen garden, a farm and a boat on the water - a world the Deschachts, farmers and labourers, saw only from the road.

The family was new to Wingene. A nineteenth-century index of every baptism in the parish from 1613 to 1792 lists each Schacht child by year, and the first is Josephus in 1695: no Schacht had been baptised there before Joannes and Maria arrived.⁹

The index of the Wingene baptisms lists a Josephus Schacht in 1695 and a Joanna in 1698, without their parents. The register itself names Egidius, called Gillis, born on 6 April 1705, and Joannes Baptista, born on 21 August 1707 at about three in the afternoon and baptised the next day.³⁴ A son Jan, who died at Zerkegem about 1748, is named in an index of estate inventories as "son of Jan De Schacht and ... Van Dierendonck".⁵ A Judocus, called Joos, who stood witness when Joannes Baptista married in 1729 and died at Jabbeke in 1749, was very probably another son (chapter 3).

Joannes's sister Ester lived in the same parish: nine days after Egidius's baptism, she and her husband Bartholomeus de Clercq brought their own son to the same font, with a Josephus Schacht as godfather.⁶

Ester had married Bartholomeus de Clercq at Wingene on 18 June 1692, seven weeks after her brother's wedding at Tielt; the priest wrote her name Schaets and gave neither parents nor origin.¹⁰ The marriage index of Wingene for 1613-1792 has no wedding of Joannes Schacht and Elizabetha Naesens, so their marriage took place elsewhere.¹⁰

Two more Schacht men lived at Wingene in these years: Ignatius, who married Maria Anna Declercq, buried a two-year-old son Joannes Baptista on 7 August 1720 and died a widower in 1761; and Judocus, husband of Jacoba Coosman, who died in 1739. Neither was baptised at Wingene, so both were born before the family came there - perhaps, for Ignatius, a son of Joannes's first marriage with Elizabetha Naesens (grade C at best). A daughter of Joannes, Anna, was buried there on 3 November 1711.¹¹

The end

The church in which the family worshipped was being furnished as they grew old: the communion bench was made in 1731 by Pieter Van Walleghem, and the pulpit, which is still there, is dated 1738, the year Joannes died.⁹

Joannes died on 20 November 1738, "fortified with the sacraments of the Church", and was buried two days later with a solemn mass in the churchyard on the west side. The priest called him "about 84"; ages at burial were guessed, and guessed high, for the old (chapters 1 and 4). Maria died on 24 June 1740 and was buried the next day, also on the west side of the churchyard.⁷

By then the sons had already left for the villages west of Brugge, and the next two chapters follow them there.