Netradyle

For earlier Belgian family members, the place to start is the Netradyle website, and the best page to jump into Netradyle is at https://www.netradyle.be/actes/. You will probably want to immediately translate the page to English. (Alternative site is: http://www.wallonia-asbl.be/actes/)

Netradyle is the work of the Perwez Genealogical Circle (club). It is social group of locals who gather to discuss and work on genealogy matters. Part of their efforts has been to index birth/baptisms, marriages, and deaths plus some miscellaneous items from communities in northern Wallonia, and they present this information in the “actes”= records, section of their website at the above website.

You can search through the “actes” in a variety of ways. The most straightforward is via the “direct search” box in the upper left of the actes page. For example, if you put in the name Lempereur, select baptisms/births, and click “Checker” = Search you will get a list of 320 birth/baptism records (birth if after 1796; baptism if before 1796). If you scroll down to #156 and click, you will get this:

Alternatively to this direct search procedure, you can use an advanced search, or you can use the long table of village names on the right side of the “actes” page, and search by type of acte and name in just the village of interest.

Once one has the information from the Netradyle records, it is fairly straightforward to find the actual document that is indexed. For example, to see the actual Marriage Registration above, one goes to FamilySearch and locates the records from Thorembais-les-Béguines, specifically the marriage records that include the year 1839. These are arranged by date, so ones simply browses to the date 10 July in the 1839 records, and wallah!

For Thorembais-les-Béguines, go to the familysearch find a collection under records, and in the search box type "Belgium". You'll see all the collections for the country. "Belgium, Brabant, Civil Registration, 1582-1914," is the collection we want since Thorembais-les-Béguines is part of the Walloon Brabant Province.

Belgian Roadside Chapels

When covid started last year, Fr. Edward Looney the pastor at St. Francis & St Mary's of Brussels started doing a virtual tour of the various Belgian Chapels.

The wayside votive chapels of Northeast Wisconsin are a religious tradition brought from the old world. In the 1850s, Belgian immigrants began settling in northeast Brown, northwest Kewaunee, and southern Door counties, bringing their cherished culture and customs. Primarily devout Roman Catholics, they made their homes in a wilderness where crude roads and few churches made it difficult to assemble and practice their faith. To compensate, some settlers continued the Belgian tradition of building a family chapel, often to give thanks for prayers or to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary or a special saint.

The Belgian Wayside Chapels are evidence of the historic faith of the Belgian settlers, and of the determination of their modern descendants to preserve the Belgian culture and way of life. Today, more than a dozen of these chapels are lovingly maintained, often by descendants of the families who built them.

Fr Looney started a Facebook page for his virtual tour and visits. https://www.facebook.com/BelgianRoadsideChapels

That prompted me to try and create an online map for the chapels. You'll find paper brochures in most of the chapels that were produced by the Belgian Heritage Center a while back. However since they encompass three counties the map lacks resolution. For anyone who isn't adventurous when it comes to rural roads that map mighth be problematic.

http://belgianchapels.org/

Fr. Looney has now created a gofund me page to "create aprofessional documentary and submit it to major Catholic and secular media outlets like EWTN, Catholic TV, Shalom World, Wisconsin Public Television, PBS Wisconsin, and others."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/faith-along-the-road-documentary

I am surprised how often they get visited. Most have a guest book in them. I haven't seen one that didn't have an entry more than a week old. And while a number of the visitors have Belgian last names, there are plenty of Illinois tourists checking them out... then the more odd entries like folks from Czechoslovakia, Hawaii etc.