My Flemish Ancestors

My maternal grandparents immigrated to the United States in 1901 from East Flanders, Belgium. Flanders is the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. They arrived at Ellis Island in March 1901 and moved across the Hudson River to Paterson, New Jersey. My grandfather had friends that settled in Paterson and these friends told him the “streets are lined with gold” in America. Conditions in Flanders at this time were not good. Jobs were scarce and, with a growing population, hard to come by. Their first child was born that same year. Over the next 24 years they would have 7 more. Child number 6, born in 1918, was my mother.

My grandfather got a job in the locomotive factory and made trains for several years. Before my mother was born, he had switched careers, meeting a man who was a cement contractor. He learned the business and put in many curbs and sidewalks in the Paterson area. He also became a property owner, building and renting units in two duplex homes. The streets were “lined with gold” if you were willing to work hard.

The challenge for me, the genealogist, is that after one generation, I have to do all my research in records that are primarily in Dutch. There was a brief period when Napoleon added Belgium to his empire and forced the Flemish to keep their records in French. For a number of years, I did not do anything with my maternal lines. I knew the names of my mothers grandparents but that was about the extent of my knowledge. In 2007, a book, “Searching for Flemish (Belgian) Ancestors”, by Josef J. Goethals in collaboration with Karel Denys CICM,was published by Clearfield Company (printed by Genealogical Publishing Co.). Shortly thereafter, I bought a copy. This energized my research. This book is chock full of helpful information. It starts out with an introductory chapter on Flemish history, includes a chapter on Flemish resources in the United States and civil, parish and other records to be found in Belgium. When I found out that civil records had been filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, I really got excited and ordered film for the town of Kaprijke. The book by Goethals lays out the structure of each record, gives the Dutch and an English translation. Each record has an Introduction which includes the date and hour of registration, the town and district and the registrar’s name. The second part is the detail information on the event and the closing gives details about the informants. There are separate records for births, marriages and deaths. And they are full of detail.

I was so excited when I found my great grandfather’s birth record. With the help of this book and a Dutch dictionary, I was able to get the main facts out of the record. The record named the parents and gave their ages, so it was possible to find the birth records of the parents. But, of course, these would have been several years earlier and not on the roll of film I had. So, order more film, wait 4-6 (OR MORE) weeks and then continue your research. I looked up his parents’ births but did not attempt to go back further. Then I realized this summer that these records are all on line and can be downloaded and examined in the comfort of my own home. Yippee!!! So this summer, I filled in my family tree back to the mid eighteenth century. (Official record keeping started about 1795 with the coming of Napoleon.)

If you have to do research in a foreign country, find yourself a good resource and a good dictionary or a good list of terms. Check on line; more and more records are being digitized and are available. And if you have any cousins in the old country, look them up. Mine have been very generous with their time and very patient with my lack of knowledge of their language. You may be surprised at how much you can get done right in your own home.