The Household in Which They Grew Up
Petrus Joannes Van Landschoot was born on 2 June 1779 in Sint-Laureins, in the northern part of East Flanders, and was baptized the same day in the parish church of Saint Laurentius. The record, still preserved in Latin, names him as the son of Bauduin Lanschoot and Suzanna Willems. He belonged to a rural world of fields, parish boundaries, seasonal labour, and close-knit hamlets, a world that would shape his children even as some of them would later leave it behind forever.
As an adult, Petrus Joannes settled in Sint-Jan-in-Eremo, more precisely in the small district of Zonne. There he married twice. His first wife, Francisca Remery of Kaprijke, bore him four daughters between 1813 and 1818. Her death in March 1818 left the household wounded but not broken. Later that same year, on 16 October 1818, Petrus Joannes married Joanna Cornelia De Villers of Watervliet. From this second marriage came a new generation of children, among them the three sons whose lives would carry the Van Landschoot name far beyond the Flemish countryside.
This was no extraordinary family in outward appearance. Like many households in the region, they knew both continuity and grief. Several children died young. Petrus Joannes himself died in 1835, at the age of fifty-five, and his widow Joanna Cornelia De Villers followed him in 1843. Her death record, drawn up at Sint-Jan-in-Eremo, shows how ordinary and how fragile such a life could be: she died in the house of her brother-in-law, and her passing was reported not by a wealthy notable but by a farm servant and a local police officer.
Petrus Landschoot — The Brother Who Reached America
Petrus, later often known as Peter Landschoot, was born at Sint-Jan-in-Eremo on 8 January 1823. His life would become the best documented of the three, not least because he founded the American branch that took root in Michigan. The exact date of his departure from Belgium is not fully certain, yet a militia certificate dated 17 February 1851 strongly suggests that he was preparing to emigrate. That document states that he had been drawn for military service in 1842 but had been released from further obligation in 1849 because a brother who was serving had been killed. Behind those dry administrative words lies a family tragedy that changed the fate of the surviving brothers.
After leaving Belgium, Petrus established himself in Michigan. On 25 November 1857 he married Catherine Curley at Saint Clement’s Church in Center Line. She had been born in New York in 1835, and together they formed a household that was both immigrant and American. They lived first in Sterling, in Macomb County, where settlements were still scattered and daily life required endurance, adaptability, and hard work. Petrus earned his living as a travelling trader, a profession well suited to rural districts where goods and services had to move from farm to farm rather than wait behind a town counter.
His American life was interrupted by the Civil War. In October 1864, at the age of forty-one, he was enrolled as a private soldier in Pontiac and soon assigned to Company G of the 12th Michigan Infantry. His age alone tells us something important: he was not one of the young adventurers who had rushed to war in 1861, but a mature immigrant, husband, and father called into service in the final and exhausting phase of the conflict.
In February 1865 his regiment was sent to Duvall’s Bluff in Arkansas. The conditions there were miserable. Rain, swampy ground, and exposure undermined the health of many soldiers, and Petrus suffered severely from chronic diarrhea and rheumatism. He resisted being sent to hospital, knowing the terrible reputation such places had among soldiers. Instead, he remained in camp, weakened but still with the regiment. During later marches he reportedly collapsed more than once and needed help to continue. By the time he was finally discharged in Little Rock in October 1865, war had left its mark permanently on his health.
Even so, he resumed civilian life. He returned to trading and also attempted the trade of cooper, but his rheumatism made the bending and heavy work too painful. In 1879 he settled in Port Huron, where he lived more quietly and cultivated his garden whenever his strength allowed. Catherine Curley had given him five children — Mary Ann, Louisa, John Henry, Rosalie Alma, and Julia Emily — and through them his line continued firmly in Michigan.
Petrus died in December 1908 in Port Huron, at the age of eighty-five. By then the son of a Flemish farmer’s household had become the ancestor of a large American family. Many decades later, his descendants still remembered him. In May 2001, when family research brought his story back into focus, about sixty relatives gathered in Port Huron to meet and reconnect with their Belgian kin. Present that day was Joseph Ward, then ninety-two years old, the last surviving grandson of Petrus Landschoot.
Livinus Bernardus Van Landschoot — The Brother Who Went to Peru
Livinus Bernardus Van Landschoot was born on 24 April 1827 in Zonne, Sint-Jan-in-Eremo. Of the three brothers, he remains the most elusive. Yet the traces that survive are fascinating. Before 1860 he had found employment connected to the great horticultural house of Verschaffelt, a renowned Belgian establishment that had built an international reputation for ornamental plants and botanical exchange. In the nineteenth century, horticulture was no small local craft. It was part of a global network linking Europe with collectors, nurseries, estates, and botanical interests in the Americas and beyond.
Within that world, Livinus appears as a skilled gardener who had gone abroad. He is mentioned as head gardener to Mr. Porta in Lima, Peru. That single detail is enough to place him in a remarkable international context. He was not a mass emigrant farmer nor a soldier, but a trained specialist whose knowledge of plants and cultivation made him valuable on another continent. Like many such men, he slipped into history only briefly, leaving behind little more than his name, his profession, and the city in which he worked.
After 1861 his trail disappears. Whether he died in Peru, moved elsewhere in South America, or returned to Europe remains unknown. Yet even this fragment tells an important story. In the same generation that sent Flemish families to the American Midwest, it also sent skilled men into the wider world of commerce, horticulture, and elite estates. Livinus belongs to that lesser-known current of migration.
Seraphinus Van Landschoot — The Brother Who Died in Naval Service
Seraphinus, the youngest of the three, was born on 6 November 1831 in Zonne. His road led not inland, nor across the Atlantic, but toward the sea. He became a first-class marine in Dutch service and was attached to a steam-powered frigate named Zeeland. His career belongs to a transitional naval age, when European fleets were moving from sail to steam and maritime service increasingly demanded discipline, technical adaptation, and long absences from home.
In January 1863 Seraphinus was in the garrison hospital at Vlissingen in the Netherlands, seriously ill. Knowing that death might come soon, he dictated his testament before the notary Dirk Uyllenhooven. The document is moving in its simplicity. Far from Sint-Jan-in-Eremo, without a fixed residence, he named Franciscus Leonardus Soulimans, a woodcutter connected with the navy in Vlissingen, as his universal heir. The notarial act, witnessed and signed in the hospital, gives us a final and unusually intimate glimpse of him: a young man, sick, conscious, and anxious to put his affairs in order before the end.
Seraphinus died on 15 January 1863, only days after the will had been drawn up. He was thirty-one years old. The cause of death was recorded as “water on the chest,” a phrase often used in the nineteenth century for severe pulmonary illness. His story is the briefest of the three, yet also one of the most poignant. He never founded a large family abroad, never returned home to old age, and never left many records behind. But the will he signed in Vlissingen preserves the last voice of a Van Landschoot son who died far from the Flemish fields where he had been born.
A Family Story Across Borders
Together, these three brothers embody the wide horizon of the nineteenth century. They were born in the same village world, shaped by the same parents, and marked by the same early losses. Yet one became part of the immigrant story of Michigan, one entered the international horticultural world of Peru, and one served on a steam-powered naval vessel and died in the Netherlands.
Their lives remind us that even families rooted in small rural communities were never as immobile as they may appear in parish registers and civil acts. Under the surface of those records lay ambition, hardship, mobility, war, and long-distance connection. The sons of Petrus Joannes Van Landschoot did not all remain in East Flanders. Instead, they carried the family name into very different worlds, leaving descendants, silences, and traces that still speak across two centuries.