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.

Some early history

Every now and then I like to look at what recent books have been added to the Internet Archive collection that you can borrow/check out.

The following is from "The growth of the Belgian Nation" by: Jan Albert Goris published in 1946:

Belgium has also at all times evinced a spirit of expansion. Although the Belgians have occasionally been reproached for being stay-at-home folks, history seems to contradict this accusation. A few years after Caesar conquered Belgium, Walloon soldiers were fighting in the ranks of the Roman legions. Later they took part in ail the big European battles, during the wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Considerable numbers of Flemings and Walloons followed William the Conqueror to England, and later the weavers of Flanders settled in Great Britain by thousands. There were Belgian migrations to Pomerania, Silesia, Hungary. And at the time of the great voyages of exploration and discovery, natives of Ghent peopled the "Flemish Isles" which later were called the Azores.

This helps explain why you'll find some people with the same surnames in England as you do in Belgium.

And as early as the 9th century, miners and iron workers came to Sweden from southern and eastern Belgium, along with neighboring areas in France. Most of the Walloons were iron workers coming from the Liege and Namur regions, along the Meuse River.

Belgian Population Registers

Ron Flemal has spotted some Belgian Population Registers on FamilySearch that are helpful to settlers in the Door and Kewaunee County areas.

I am reposting it here like I do a number of things since things get lost on social media due to the walled garden effect and generally don't get indexed by the search engines, etc.

The population registers are as close as you get to the United States census records. Kristine Smets' wrote a very good overview of the Belgian population registers, explaining the background and what you can expect to learn from them.

Film#: 008895560 (DGS) https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1395667?availability=Family%20History%20Library
There are a few neighborhoods on this continuous film, an area of interest; Emimes begins at image 831:

Emines, Namur Population Register 1846-1866: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-Y3GZ-DD41?i=830&cat=1395698

Film#: 008895560 Neuvilles and Gilots, of Emines, Belgium (beginning at image 954): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-Y3GZ-DZY2?cat=1395698

Film#: 008897195 (DGS) Saint-Denis, Namur Population Register 1846-1900: https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/1409269?availability=Family%20History%20Library

Film#: 008897195 Delwiche of Saint-Denis, Belgium (beginning at image 92): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-13G6-6611

Film#: 008897195 Jeanquart of Saint-Denis, Belgium (beginning at image 119) https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-B3G6-66N7?cat=1409267

Don't Drink This Water

From the Li walon po tertos group:

Language is about identity

In a 2013 paper by Jacqueline Lee Tinkler, titled "Determinants of Ethnic Retention As See Through Walloon Immigrants to Wisconsin," she pointed out;

"For generations, the community remained a close-knit, cohesive, nearly self-sufficient ethnic island, maintaining their religion, language, and customs.

After Indian reservations and the Amish communities, the settlement of Walloon Belgians in northeast Wisconsin is the most enduring ethnic island in the United States. "

Recently a two page article on revitalizing Indigenous languages in Wisconsin appeared in the local newspaper. (GBPG Wed, Jun 9, 2021)

"Laugauge is at a core of what ie means to be Oneida, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Mohican, Potawatomi or Ojibwe, as the phrases and sentences consistently reinforce an Indigenous way of thinking at looking at the world", Francour and others say. "Language is about identity as a people, and it had been nearly completly taken away through forced assimilation..."

The article about Native American lanugages really can apply to our own native Walloon language. It's worth a read. Think about lanugage in the context that Belgium didn't become its own county till 1830, and just a short time later many left to come to Wisconsin. It wasn't so much their county that defined them as it was their language. That language traces back to the Holy Roman Empire.

And we have all heard or read the story of when our ancestors first came to Wisconsin and had planned to settle near Sheboygan, but had trouble communicating there as it was mostly all Germans. So they headed North as they heard there were French speakers there.

Sewing/Quilting - Margaret Monfils