Chapter 4. Jan Dewulf and Anna Theresia De Corte, Handzame and Torhout, 1758 to 1834

Two boys called Joannes Baptiste

Joannes Baptiste Dewulf, known as Jan, was born at Torhout on 28 November 1758, the second child of Adrianus and Joanna Theresia (chapter 3). Six years later, on 23 May 1764, another Joannes Baptiste Dewulf was baptised in the same church, a son of Josephus Dewulf and Maria Vanhollebeke.¹ There was nothing unusual in that. Joannes Baptista was one of the commonest names in eighteenth-century Flanders, and Torhout was full of Dewulfs.

It has had consequences. A pedigree of Ingrid Dewulf printed in 2019 took the boy of 1764 as her ancestor. It then followed his father back to a Josephus Jacobus Dewulf, born at Staden in 1730, a baker who married at Loppem and died at Brugge, and from him through Staden to "about 1599".² The whole of that branch belongs to another family. The proof is in Jan's own marriage act, which states in so many words when he was born and to whom.

The wedding of February 1797

Jan married at Handzame, the bride's village, on 2 February 1797. It was the fifth year of the French Republic. The parish priest no longer made marriages; a municipal agent did, at the town house of the commune. The act was written in Flemish, in the new republican form.³

On the one side stood joannes baptiste de wulf jongman landsman oud 38 jaeren woonende in de commune van thorout geboortig van thorout zone van adriaen de wulf ende moeder joanna de vulder: Joannes Baptiste de Wulf, bachelor, farmer, aged thirty-eight, living at Thorout and born there, son of Adriaen de Wulf and Joanna de Vulder. On the other side stood Anna Theresia de Corte, aged twenty-nine, living at Handzame, daughter of Joseph de Corte and Rosa Constantia Maerten. Both couples of parents were dead.³

The agent then did what the new law required. He read out the birth record of each partner, and copied the essentials into the act:

getrocken den act van geboorte van joannes baptiste de wulf dat hij gebooren is 28 november 1758 in de commune van thorout uyt het wettig huwelijk van adrianus de wulf en moeder joanna de vulder

"...the birth record of Joannes Baptiste de Wulf, showing that he was born on 28 November 1758 in the commune of Thorout, of the lawful marriage of Adrianus de Wulf and Joanna de Vulder." The date is the one in the baptismal register (chapter 3), and a man born in 1764 could not have been thirty-eight in February 1797. The bride, the record said, had been born at Kortemark on 12 April 1768.³

Anna Theresia was given away in the company of her brother Pieter Jacobus de Corte, aged twenty-four. The groom's side was represented by two men of Handzame, one of them an innkeeper, Jacobus van Middelem.³ The banns had been posted on the door of the town house. No one objected, and the agent pronounced them married in den naem van de wet, "in the name of the law".

Under the Republic

The civil wedding was one sign of the new order. Since the annexation of 1795 the French had taxed church property, requisitioned goods for their armies, closed churches, and hunted down priests who would not swear the oath of "hatred of monarchy". Then the Jourdan law of 5 September 1798 made every young man between twenty and twenty-five liable to serve in the French army, something the country had never known. Thousands refused. In October 1798 the countryside rose in the Boerenkrijg, the Peasants' War; there was fighting at Kortrijk and at Tielt, before the rising was crushed at Hasselt on 5 December 1798.⁷ Jan was forty that year, married, with a baby daughter, and neither he nor his younger brothers, in their late twenties, were of an age to be called up. The records say nothing of what they thought.

Farmers at Torhout

Torhout was an old market town that had long since lost its importance. Its yearly fair, protected by the counts' castle of Wijnendale, had drawn merchants since the eleventh century, and Philip of Alsace had granted the town its charter in 1183; but trade moved to the sea, and by the seventeenth century the great market square had been parcelled out. What remained were breweries and potteries, the church of Sint-Pietersbanden, and, since 1713, a town hall in German baroque in the middle of the market. Under Austrian rule in the eighteenth century the town grew again: paved roads were laid to Bruges, Roeselare and Ostend, and the heathland to the north and east was divided up and planted with trees in a grid.⁹

The couple settled at Torhout, and their children were born there under the French regime. The civil clerks now wrote the father's name in French, as Jean or Jean Baptiste Dewulf:⁴

Carel was born barely two weeks before the republican calendar was abandoned on 1 January 1806, which is why his marriage act, thirty years later, still gives his birth in the language of the Revolution: den vyf en twintigsten frimaire jaer veertien der fransche tydrekening, the twenty-fifth of Frimaire of Year Fourteen of the French reckoning.⁵

His own birth act is still there. On the morning of 25 Frimaire, Year XIV, Jean Baptiste de Wulf, "cultivateur, agé de quarante huit ans", went to the town hall to present a son born at two that morning, and gave him the name Charles. One witness was Pierre Alexandre Maertens, a blacksmith from Handzame; Anna Theresia's mother was a Maerten. Jan signed joannes de wulf. A year later he registered a daughter, Colete, and in August 1809 another, Colete Victoire: the second name was given again, which suggests that the first Colete had died. The 1809 act gives Anna Theresia's age as forty, and this time Jan signed jan de wulf.⁸

Two of the sons married two sisters. Pieter Leopold married Catharina Borra in 1830, and Carel married Eugenia Borra in 1834; both brides were daughters of Jan Borra and Marie Therese Pollet.⁶ Ambrosius became a farmer at Lichtervelde and was a witness at the birth of Carel's son Desiré in 1841 (chapter 6). Angela married three times, at Torhout in 1822 and at Bovekerke in 1833 and 1852, and died at Bovekerke in 1879.⁴

The end

Anna Theresia died at Torhout on 7 October 1828, and Jan on 18 June 1834, aged seventy-five. Both dates are recorded in the marriage act of their son Carel, four months after Jan's death.⁵