Bruno BAECKELANDT

• General Notes
  • b. Aalter, Belgium
    m. Ruiselede, Belgium 24 Apr 1863
    d. Bellem, Belgium
    
    Bruno was born in the Oudemeulen (Old Mill) quarter of the town of Aalter, in West Flanders. He later lived in both the Sterrestaat and the Schoonberg Quarters as well.  Bruno's stepmother Frederica Vervinckt moved to next-door Ruiselede in 1852, taking his 10-year-old half-sister Pauline with her.  Bruno, however, was already 18 years old, and he went to live with his guardian Petrus Baeckelandt (b. 1821 in Lovendegem but living in Bellem); and he worked as a servant at the farm of Leo Claeys at Beernem.
    
    Bruno was the first of his line to be born into the newly independent Belgium kingdom.  During his lifetime, the first railway was built on the European continent (1835) and Belgium became a colonial power with Leopold II's seizure of the Congo (1881).
    
    According to his military documents, Bruno was a small man, 1.65 meters (5 feet 5 inches) tall. He had fair hair and eyebrows, grey eyes, a round mouth, and a small chin.  He served in the 11th Line Infantry Regiment.
    
    In 1858, at 25, he became godfather to his older sister Rosalie's son.  In April 1863, Bruno married Melanie De Fauw, who was a seamstress.  In his marriage record, we see that Bruno could not sign the record, as he was illiterate.  After his marriage he went to live in Maria-Aalter (also called Aaltershoeksken).
    
    He took up farming on a small scale.  From 1864 to 1869, he and Melanie had five children in Aalter; of them, Henri (1865) and Joannes (1868) died in infancy.  Then, in October 1869, Bruno moved to the province of Antwerp for a year.  While there, he worked in Meerle, near the Dutch border, draining moors for farmland and industry.
    
    Toward the end of 1870, Bruno returned to the Zandvleuge quarter of Ruiselede and to his life as a farmer.  Later on, he moved to Ruiselede's Axpoele Quarter.  His two oldest boys, August and Charles-Louis, attended school in Maria-Aalter, although not full-term, because they had to work on the farm in the summer.  Another six children were born in Ruiselede between 1872 and 1882.  For a few months, from May to July 1876, Bruno took a job in industry in Seraing, in French-speaking Wallonia, to the south.  On his return to Ruiselede, he settled in the Strookot Quarter, where his younger sister Pauline lived with her husband, Henri De Cock.  Around this time, another child, Elisa-Leontine, was born in Ruiselede (1878) and died within a year.
    
    In March 1889, Bruno moved back to Aalter, to the Hageland Quarter, followed a month later by his sons Charles-Louis (25) and August (22), who had been working in the countryside near Ruiselede.  All of them worked the land there as farmers.
    
    In 1895, at the age of 62, Bruno moved to the Markette Quarter of Bellem, near Aalter, where he spent the rest of his life, a retired farmer.  His youngest child, Eliza-Celina, turned thirteen that year.  Two of Bruno's older children, Charles-Louis and Elodie, were already married at that time, and two more - August and Peter Kamiel - soon followed suit.  After August, Kamiel, and Marie-Louise's weddings, Bruno continued to live at home with his son Jules and daughter Elisa at Bellem.  Four of his children emigrated to the United States, including August. 
    
    At the end of Bruno's life, senility set in, and sometimes his daughters had to look after him when he went out walking in the woods.  He died at five-o'clock in the morning on 21 January 1914, at the age of 82, in the home of his daughter Elodie in Bellem's Markette Quarter.  Bruno passed away in peacetime, five months before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I.
    

Click here for details of Bruno's family with Melanie DE FAUW

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