Chapter 2. Loonis Dewulf and Maria vande Casteele, Torhout, about 1670 to 1751

A man with six names

In the baptism registers of Torhout, the father of the children in this chapter is written six different ways. In 1699 the priest wrote Eulonius. From 1701 to 1716 he is Leonardus. In 1714 he is Lionis, which a modern indexer, reading the first letter as an S, turned into Simon. In 1718 he is Ludovicus. The volunteers who indexed the estate inventories of the district call him Louis. The inventories themselves call him Loonis.¹

Loonis is the key. It is a Flemish everyday name, the kind of name a man was called by in the village and at the alehouse. When he brought a child to the font, each priest had to turn it into Latin, and each made his own guess. "Euloni" (1699) and "Lionis" (1714) are attempts to write down the sound. "Leonardus" and "Ludovicus" are the nearest proper saints' names beginning with L. The mother is the same woman every time, Maria vande Casteele, and the godparents come from the same two families. It is one man.

Maria vande Casteele

Maria vande Casteele was born about 1678; she was "about seventy-three" when she died in 1751.² The Vande Casteeles were an old Torhout family, and the godparents her side sent to the font were Catharina, Henricus, Anna and Petronella vande Casteele.³ Loonis and Maria were married at Kortemark, his father's parish, on 7 April 1697; the marriage table there writes him "Leo".¹² They settled at Torhout, and their first child was born there less than two years later.

Eight children at Sint-Pietersbanden

The church in which their children were baptised was the one rebuilt in 1617-1623 after the religious troubles of the sixteenth century, around a Romanesque tower that already stood when the Dewulfs came.⁴ All eight baptisms have been read on the images:³

The godparents on the father's side are the family of chapter 1. Judocus de Wulf and Maria Pateels stood for the first three children, as grandparents did. Godeleva de Wulf, Loonis's sister, stood for the fourth. For the last child, Adrianus, the godmother was Joanna Waelegem, the wife of Loonis's brother Marinus at Kortemark.

The eldest son, Judocus, was named after his grandfather. What became of him is not known: the Judocus de Wulf buried at Torhout in June 1705 was a grown man, probably the grandfather himself (chapter 1).⁵ One of the twins of 1701, the boy baptised Leonardus, carried his father's Latin name; nothing more is known of him.

A battle at the edge of town

The children were born in wartime. In 1701 the War of the Spanish Succession broke out, and for twelve years the armies of France and of the Grand Alliance fought across Flanders. In the summer of 1708, after their victory at Oudenaarde, Marlborough and Prince Eugene laid siege to Lille, and a convoy of some seven hundred wagons of ammunition set out from Ostend to reach them. Its road ran past Torhout. On 28 September 1708, at Wijnendale, on the edge of the town, an allied force of about 7,500 men under Major General John Webb drew up across the road in an open space between woods and hedges, with Prussian, Hanoverian and Dutch battalions hidden among the trees. It threw back a French and Spanish army three times its size. The convoy got through, and Lille fell on 22 October.¹³

The fight lasted about two hours. Between three and four thousand French and Spanish officers and men were killed; the allies counted some nine hundred dead and wounded, and about two thousand prisoners were taken to Bruges.¹⁶

Seven weeks before the battle, on 12 August 1708, Loonis and Maria had their daughter Petronella baptised at Sint-Pietersbanden. The registers say nothing about what the battle meant for them.

The war ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and the southern Netherlands passed from Spain to the Austrian Habsburgs.¹⁴ Victoria, born in January 1714, was the first of the children born in peacetime.

When did Loonis die?

The index of the estate inventories gives Louis Dewulf a date of death of 30 January 1760. That date is wrong. It belongs to a girl of eighteen, Maria Anna de Wulf, daughter of Jacobus, who died at Handzame on 30 January 1760 and whose inventory sits next to Louis's in the index.⁶ The slip is mechanical: in this part of the index each date of death is printed one line too early, against the inventory before the one it belongs to. The same shift gave Loonis's son Pieter a wrong date (below). The Torhout register tells a different story. On 28 March 1751 Maria vande Casteele died, "about seventy-three", and she was buried two days later as a widow of a de Wulf: the husband's first name, at the end of the line, has been washed away by water.² Loonis was dead before 1751.

Two Torhout burials are candidates. On 6 December 1720 "Ludovicus De wolf, coniugatus", a married man, was buried with the smallest funeral. On 5 December 1732 a Ludovicus dewulf died and was buried with the office of three lessons.⁷ The first fits best. No child was born to Maria after Adrianus in October 1718, and a married Ludovicus died two years later. If so, Maria lived on as a widow for thirty years, and saw her son Adrianus married.

The index of Kortemark's orphan acts settles the choice as far as an index can. It has an act for "Louis De Wulf, died 1722 at Torhout" and Marie Vande Casteele (vol. 2, p. 31), with Joos De Wulf and Mayke Pateel, Maryn De Wulf, Isabella De Wulf and a Ryckwaert De Wulf with Anna Lauwaerts on the same page, and a second act for "Loon De Wulf" and Marie (p. 44). An act of 1722 after a burial in December 1720 is the usual delay; the man of 1732 would have needed an act of 1733 or later. The index of the estate inventories points the same way. Read with the one-line shift described below, it dates Louis's inventory to December 1722: that date is printed against the inventory of a namesake at Hooglede, who was buried in July 1732 and so could not have had an estate inventory ten years before.⁸ If, as the index suggests, Joos and Mayke stand in that act as his parents, it is the second statement, independent of the Torhout inventory, of who Loonis's parents were. It has not yet been read.⁷

What became of the children

Three of the children can be followed a little further, and each one leads back to Adrianus.

• Maria Godeleva married Jacobus Kesteloot at Torhout on 6 May 1731.⁹ She outlived him, and was buried at Kortemark, her grandparents' parish, on 30 January 1780, "widow of Jacobus Kesteloot", aged seventy-seven.¹² When their daughter Anna Theresia was baptised on 6 May 1738, the godfather was Henricus de Wolf, her brother, the surviving twin.¹⁰ Eighteen years later Jacobus Kesteloot was a witness at Adrianus's wedding (chapter 3).
• Petrus Jacobus, called Pieter, married Marie-Anne Devoldere at Kortemark on 13 May 1732.¹² He died at Handzame in March 1736, not yet thirty-one, and was buried there on 6 March as "Petrus, husband of Maria Anna Devolder".¹⁵ His estate inventory names his parents as "Loonis Dewulf" and "Marie Vandecasteele".¹
• Petronella, called Pieternelle, married Joannes Goes. When he died in 1768, the court appointed a guardian from her side of the family for their son. It was Adriaen de Wulf. The inventory calls her "Pieternelle de Wulf, daughter of Loonis by Marij van de Casteele".¹

Which Adrianus?

One point has to be stated plainly, because an earlier version of this chapter got it wrong. Torhout's baptism register has one boy called Adrianus de Wulf in these years: Adrianus Judocus, born on 4 October 1718, the son of Loonis and Maria vande Casteele. A second Adrianus, born on 29 November 1722, was at first read as the son of a "Jacobus de Wolf" and Juliana Beernaerd, and was treated as a rival. On a second reading of the same page the priest's word is de nolf: the boy was Adrianus Emmanuel Denolf, one of six children of Jacobus Denolf and Juliana Beernaerd baptised at Torhout between 1715 and 1731, and he married Petronella Dickele there in 1762. The AGATHA index reads the name the same way. There was no rival.¹¹ A search of every Torhout baptism from February 1719 to February 1721 found no other Adrianus, and the index of all Torhout baptisms from 1700 to 1760 has no other Adrianus Dewulf.¹¹

The Adrianus who married in 1756 gave his age as thirty-seven in September 1757 and thirty-eight in November 1758; the boy of 1718 was in fact thirty-eight and forty, a slip of a year or two of the kind that is usual when a priest asked a man his age. Five things tie him to the family of Loonis:

1. the first witness at his wedding in 1756 was Jacobus Kesteloot, the husband of Loonis's daughter Maria Godeleva;
2. Henricus de Wolf, Loonis's son, stood with the Kesteloots at the font in 1738;
3. in 1768 an Adriaen de Wulf was guardian on the mother's side for the children of Pieternelle, Loonis's daughter, a role normally given to a brother;
4. the godmother of his own son in 1758 was a Maria de Wulf, which fits his sister Maria Godeleva;
5. at his daughters' baptisms, Jacobus Kesteloot was godfather in 1761 and a Petronilla de Wulf, the name of Loonis's daughter Pieternelle, was godmother in 1763 (chapter 3).

Five threads, and no other Adrianus de Wulf in the parish. This account therefore takes the Adrianus of 1718 as the ancestor. No single act says "son of Loonis" outright; the estate inventories requested from the archive in Bruges should.