West Flanders Belgium Indexes

Thanks to Bos Genealogy in English for tweeting about these new records for Belgium genealogy.

My husband's great-grandfather Achilles (Archie) DeMeuleneare was born in Tielt, West Flanders so this is of great interest to us. 

Province West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, index civil records of death 1794-1926 [SEARCH or INDEX] 

concerns Boezinge (1899-1919), 

Houthem-bij-Ieper (1891-1913), 

Ieper (1806), 

Koekelare (1896-1906), 

Kortrijk (1876), 

Nieuwkerke (1880-1919)

Adriaen Vincent, a Walloon from Belgium

 

Adriaen Vincent, a Walloon from Belgium, made the perilous journey to New Netherland with his wife Magdaleen and their young family in the early 1640s. A former West Indies Company soldier, Adriaen was embarking on a new life.

The family settled in the village of New Amsterdam, which would one day become the city of New York. Life could not have been easy for the couple, faced with a different culture and language.

Read more at Adriaen Vincent the Walloon

Think Outside the Box When Searching for Ancestors

I've been looking for my husband's great-grandfather Archie DeMeuleaneare in the 1921 Ontario census. As you can imagine, his surname DeMeuleaneare can has been spelled a dizzying variety of ways in records. I've found him as DeMeulenaire, DeMulenare, and yes, even De Millionaire.

To make searching even more challenging, Archie was born in Belgium as Achilles (pronounced AW-she, hence the Anglicization to Archie). So I have to go slowly and methodically, and search with all possible variations of both names. That is where wildcards come in. Wildcards are your friend. I'd be lost without them.

So in searching on Ancestry.com for Archie and his family in 1921 I was feeling pretty confident. I know the "tricks", I use wildcards, I start with a specific search (first name, surname, date of birth +/- 2 years, location of birth, residence). If that doesn't pan out I start eliminating fields. But the standard techniques were not working. I was getting no hits or thousands!

I decided to try searching for his wife. No dice. Okay I thought, I'll try searching for one of his children. Again I came up empty.

This is where genealogists need to think outside the box. Now is the time to try searching on just a first name and location - nothing else. Or a child's first name. Or a spouse. You may have to scroll through a few hundred results but that often does lead to success.

Jumping ahead, I'll share with you that I did eventually find Archie and his family - mistranscribed and indexed under the surname "Tekealeneau"

1921 Census Waterloo Township, Ontario

It is easy to see how the transcriber would have trouble with the surname! And that is why genealogists need to think outside the box when searching for an ancestor. Don't assume the indexing is correct. Don't assume the transcriber understood what they saw on the document.

Be persistent, be methodical, and be creative. You can't go wrong if you follow those three rules. 

Belgian Woman Searches for her Canadian soldier father

Florence Heene never knew her father. She first saw a photo of the man she believes is the soldier who is her biological dad when she was young. Now 71, Florence posted the photo on Facebook hoping it might be shared and that someone in Canada would recognize him.

Her mother had told Heene that her biological father was a Canadian soldier who was stationed in Ghent during the Second World War. It is believed his first name is Herbert. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) believes from the photo that the man in question was a Sergeant in the Royal Canadian Military.

 Read Searching for a Canadian soldier: Belgian woman makes last-ditch effort to find her father

Since writing this blog post, the mystery of Herbert has been solved. It's as fascinating  (and sad) a story as Florence's search for him.

Read Mystery solved: Belgian woman finds 'new family' in Canada in search for soldier father

Preserving a WW1 Soldier's Room for 96 years After He Died

WW1 Soldier Hubert Rochereau died 96 years ago in Belgium. His parents left his bedroom untouched and stipulated when they sold the house in 1935 that nothing in the room be disturbed for 500 years.

Cropped Photo from The Guardian. Original Photograph: Bruno Mascle

A lace bedspread is still on the bed, adorned with photographs and Rochereau’s feathered helmet. His moth-eaten military jacket hangs limply on a hanger. His chair, tucked under his desk, faces the window in the room where he was born on 10 October 1896.

He died in an English field ambulance on 26 April 1918, a day after being wounded during fighting for control of the village of Loker, in Belgium.
Continue reading and see the photos at French soldier’s room unchanged 96 years after his death in first world war in The Guardian

Looking for WW2 Canadian Soldiers in Belgium

Olive Tree Genealogy received the following note as a comment on one of my blog posts. I don't usually post such items but decided this request was intriguing enough to warrant its own placement here. 

Mr. Landsheer was willing to have his email published so if you can help, please post your information here in the comments section and also send it to Mr. Landsheer's email.

Here is his note:
 
I am from Belgium and looking for information about Canadian soldiers during WW2. During the war Gent was liberated by Canadian soldiers. Some of these men stayed by the local people of Gent. Some stayed by my grandparents. Both sides kept contact by writing letters. 

Here some information about some soldiers: 

Name Mac Leod Roy his wife Evelin and son Laurie adress: 338 St George Moncton New Brunswick Canada Army unit: C Comp. North S. Regiment C.A.O. 

Name: Eddy Duggan (soldier)his father William Duggan Toronto - Ontario 

Name: Wilkinson Johnny adress: 548 8av and 6419 - 11the Rosemount Montreal 

 Name: Miss Cappi mother of one of the soldiers 

I look forward to more information and I hope some still alive. 

My name: yves De Landsheer landscamp@gmail.com 


Credits: "Lost Or Found Directions" by Stuart Miles on FreeDigitalPhotos.Net

The Name Game Part 2

Continuing from The Name Game

But as we delved further back we found that during the Napoleonic years (early 1800s) the church records were now written in French. Still okay though as I took 5 years of French in High School and remember enough to read basic French text.

What I wasn't counting on was a brand new calendar! I had never seen this calendar before, it used different names in place of the months as we know them, and did not even encompass the same days in each month as we know them. So for example "pluviose" might be used in the date. I now know that "pluviose" covered 20 January to 18 February but I had no idea what it meant when we first found it used in a record we needed.

I've learned now that this callendar was started by the French in 1792 with Year 1 and it ended in 1805 with year XIV. It is called the French Republican Calendar Once we got back to those years in the Belgium records we were lost. We had to find a resource in the library that explained this French Republican Calendar, then try to read it in super-fast speed, understand it and then convert all the records we found to a date that we understood.

Okay that problem was solved and we continued searching backward. Suddenly we were looking at church records written in Latin! Luckily for us, I'm a bit of a geek and actually took Latin for 6 years. Unluckily for us, it was many many years ago and I really don't remember much except "nulli secundus" (second to none) and "veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered).

I didn't figure that would do us much good in trying to read the church records. To my relief the Latin records were very brief and had words that one could easily recognize and convert to English. The names were "Latinized" with "us" added to the end of many of them, but still it was possible with some scrutiny to pick out the important bits.

We did find a great deal on Archie DeMeuleneare's ancestry. It wasn't easy. Reading the early handwriting was difficult. Translating clumsily from French to English, or Flemish to English or Latin to English was severe brain-strain and gave me a major headache. But we made Grandma very happy when we returned from Salt Lake City and created a book complete with graphics of the original church records on her Belgium heritage.

The Name Game

My husband's great grandfather Archie DeMeulenaere was born in Tielt Belgium. We didn't know much about him or his ancestors. One year we decided that a trip to Salt Lake City was in order and we planned to search for Archie and his ancestors in the Belgium records on micrfilm. At that time there were few, if any Belgium records online. Just recently Ancestry.com brought Wallonia, Belgium Births, 1580-1796 (in French); Wallonia, Belgium Marriages, 1580-1796 (in French) and Wallonia, Belgium Deaths, 1580-1796 (in French) online so searching is much easier.

Archie's surname DeMeulenaere can be pronounced and spelled in a dizzying variety of ways - De Millionaire, De Muelenar, and so on. So before heading off on our genealogy research trip we asked Archie's daughter (my husband's grandmother) to tell us everything she could remember about her dad - his date of birth, when he came to Canada, any middle names and so on. Nothing new was forthcoming, she knew only his first and last name (Archie DeMeulenaere), his date of birth (29 March 1884), born in Tielt, father Henry, mother's maiden name Blondell, brother Cyril (called Charles) born in September 1888.

We knew enough to know that Archie is not a Belgium name but we had no idea what the original name might be. We assumed (incorrectly as it turned out!) it would be something similar to "Archie" - perhaps Archibaldus or something like that.

On arriving at the Library in Salt Lake City we had to learn quite a bit about the Belgium records before we could begin. One important item was that Tielt is in West Flanders. It was a bit confusing for us at first, as we were not sure what language the church records would be in. Viewing the Belgium church records we realized we might be in trouble. The records were written in what I assume is Flemish - it was similiar to Dutch but it wasn't Dutch. That was okay though, as I can, with some struggling, read enough Dutch to figure out the basics of birth, marriage and death records.

We checked the birth records of the Catholic church in Tielt and rather quickly found Cyril aka Charles. He was baptised as Cyrillus with father Henri De Meulenaere and mother Maria Rosalia Blondeel. Next we began looking for other children of Henri and Rosalia, but in particular Archie born in 1884. We found 6 other siblings for Cyrillus, including one born in 1884, but Archie and no boy with a name that looked to us like it could possibly convert to Archie or Archibald in English.

Even though we did not think we had found Archie, we knew his father and mother thanks to finding Cyril's baptism record, so we continued our hunt backwards for Henri DeMeulenaere and Rosalie Blondeel's ancestry.

See The Name Game Part 2 for the rest of our story on searching the Beligium records pre 1850, including our encounter with the French Republican Calendar!

On our return back home we showed Archie's daughter our findings. The child we had found being baptised in March 1884 (on the same day as her father Archie's birthday) was called "Achillus Camillus". "Oh yes" exclaimed hubby's grandmother, "that was my father's real name." Turns out grandma knew his real name all along but didn't think to tell us....

To our N. American English ears the first name was pronounced "A-Kill-Us" so how on earth could it convert to Archie! When I told this story to my French sister-in-law, she laughed and explained that "Achillus" is pronounced "Aw-Shee". Wow, that sounds just like Archie!! And so the mystery of Archie=Achillus was solved. When Archie arrived at Ellis Island (New York) in 1900 he was recorded as "Achilles". Once he settled in Ontario Canada his new-found friends would have quickly converted his name to one they were familiar with. Thus "Aw-She" became "Archie"

Another mystery solved and over the next few days we did find quite a bit on Archie's Belgium ancestry. But it was not without a struggle and major headaches for me! You can read about that at The Name Game, Part 2