Chapter 3. Adrianus Dewulf and Joanna Theresia de Vuldere, Torhout, 1718 to 1796

A late marriage

Adrianus was born on 4 October 1718 and baptised the next morning at Sint-Pietersbanden. The priest wrote him down as Adrianus Judocus filius Ludovici de Wulf et Mariae Casteele.¹ His grandmother, Maiken Pateel, had been buried at Kortemark a week before. His father was probably dead within two years, and he grew up with his widowed mother and his older brothers and sisters (chapter 2).

He did not marry until he was thirty-seven. On 11 May 1756, after the banns, he married Joanna Theresia de Vuldere at Sint-Pietersbanden. The priest wrote:²

11a May 1756 praeviis bannis inierunt matrimonium Adrianus De Wulf et Joanna Theresia de Vuldere; testes Jacobus Kesteloot et Jacobus De Vuldere pater sponsae; ambo sunt juvenes, unus hujas, altera ex Cortemarcq: "11 May 1756. After the banns Adrianus De Wulf and Joanna Theresia de Vuldere were married. Witnesses: Jacobus Kesteloot and Jacobus De Vuldere, the bride's father. Both are unmarried; he is of this parish, she is from Kortemark."

The bride was about twenty, seventeen years younger than her husband. She came from Kortemark, the village of Adrianus's grandparents. Her father Jacobus de Vuldere stood beside her. According to the index of an estate inventory, her mother was Clara-Anna Vanclooster.³ The other witness, Jacobus Kesteloot, was the husband of Adrianus's sister Maria Godeleva.

Ten children

Over seventeen years Joanna Theresia bore at least ten children, all baptised at Torhout.⁴

• Anna, born on 10 September 1757 at about seven in the morning. Her father was "of this parish, 37", her mother "from Kortemark, 20". The godfather was Jacobus de Vuldere, avus maternus, her mother's father.⁵
• Joannes Baptista, born on 28 November 1758 at about five in the evening and baptised the next day. His godparents were Joannes de Vuldere and Maria de Wulf. He is the next link in this line (chapter 4).⁶
• Maria (8 October 1761), Isabella (1 May 1763), Rosa (26 March 1765), Angela (15 January 1767), Rosalia (1 March 1768), Cornelius (9 February 1770), Petrus Franciscus (1771) and Angela Victoria (11 December 1773).⁴

The register for these years was badly damaged by water, and some entries survive only as the ends of lines. But the godparents that can still be read are family. For Maria in 1761 they were Jacobus Kesteloot, the husband of Adrianus's sister Maria Godeleva, and Clara Van Clooster, Joanna's mother. For Isabella in 1763 the godmother was Petronilla de Wulf, Adrianus's sister Pieternelle, whose son he would take as a ward five years later. For Cornelius in 1770 it was Anna de Wulf, the eldest daughter, then twelve, and for Angela Victoria in 1773 a Joannes de Wulf, perhaps her brother Joannes Baptista, then fifteen.¹³

Die 28. 9bris 1758 circa 5am vespertinam natus et 29a baptizatus est Joannes Baptista filius legitimus Adriani de Wulf hujas 38 et Joannae de Vuldere ex Cortemarcq 22 annorum. Patrini Joannes de Vuldere et Maria de Wulf: "On 28 November 1758, at about five in the evening, was born, and on the 29th baptised, Joannes Baptista, legitimate son of Adrianus de Wulf of this parish, 38, and Joanna de Vuldere of Kortemark, 22 years old. Godparents: Joannes de Vuldere and Maria de Wulf."

Several of the children married at Torhout in the 1790s and after, and their marriage acts name their parents as Adriaen (or Adrien) de Wulf and Joanna (or Jeanne) Devuldere: Isabella in January 1796, Rosalia in July 1796, Cornille in 1802.⁷

War and peace

Adrianus grew up in the Austrian Netherlands, and for the first twenty-five years of his life the country was at peace. Then came the War of the Austrian Succession. France declared war in March 1744, and that June French troops under Maurice of Saxony crossed into Flanders and took Menen, Ypres and Veurne. After the battle of Fontenoy in May 1745 the rest of Flanders fell: Ghent on 10 July, Bruges on 18 July, Ostend in August. The French held the country until the Peace of Aachen in 1748.¹² Adrianus was between twenty-five and thirty.

The forty years that followed, under the Empress Maria Theresa, were the longest peace the region had known in generations. Farming prospered, grain exports grew after 1753, and Ostend became a busy port.¹² It was in these years, eight years after the French left, that Adrianus married, and all his children were born under Maria Theresa. The old order began to crack only near the end of his life, when the reforms of her son Joseph II, who dissolved the contemplative monasteries and abolished the old provincial institutions, provoked the Brabant Revolution of 1789-1790.¹²

The roads were changing too. In 1751 a paved highway was laid from Bruges through Torhout to Roeselare, Menen and Lille, replacing the sandy tracks that turned to mud every winter. And the dead were moved out of the churches: in Lichtervelde, the next parish, burials inside the church ended in 1783 after a ban by Emperor Joseph II. That is why Joanna Theresia, who died in 1791, was laid in the churchyard.¹⁴

A guardian

Adrianus appears once outside the registers of his own family. In June 1768 his sister Pieternelle, widowed by the death of Joannes Goes, drew up the estate inventory at Handzame, and the court named a guardian from her side of the family for her fourteen-year-old son. It was Adriaen de Wulf.⁸ The guardian from the mother's side was normally her nearest adult male relative, and Adrianus was her younger brother.

What Adrianus did for a living is not recorded in any document read so far. His son Joannes Baptiste was a landsman, a farmer, when he married in 1797.

The end of an age

Joanna Theresia died on 19 October 1791, at half past two in the afternoon, and was buried at Torhout on the 22nd, in the churchyard on the south side. The priest wrote that she was fifty-five, from Kortemark, the daughter of Jacobus and Clara Anna Van Klooster, and the wife of Adrianus de Wulf.⁹ An estate inventory was made of her goods, with her husband Adriaan Dewulf and her parents Jacob Devuldere and Clara-Anna Vanclooster named in it; the index dates it "12/1742", which is surely a misreading of 1792.³

Adrianus lived to see the old order end. French armies invaded in November 1792 and again in 1794, and on 1 October 1795 the southern Netherlands were annexed to the French Republic.¹¹ He was buried at Torhout on 28 June 1796, aged about seventy-seven. Seven months later, when his son married at Handzame, the new civil official wrote that both of Joannes Baptiste's parents had died at Torhout.¹⁰