I’m finishing 2025 with one more genealogy miracle, courtesy of FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search, which supercharged this year’s searches for me. The story I’m about to tell, however, is deeply rooted in wealthy European Catholic privilege. The Cornelis family of Antwerp (once Spanish Flanders, now Belgium) left behind many clues because of their affluence, and I learned about them through, of all things, my probable ancestor’s application to work for the Spanish Inquisition!
I say "probable" because I have found a number of DNA links to descendants of my 3rd-great-grandmother's adopted family, the Herrera Leiva family of Cartagena, Colombia. My probable 5th-great-grandfather, Lázaro María Herrera Leiva y Cornelis (born 1755), was the horrid alguacil mayor (chief justice) of the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Cartagena, who earned his job after proving that his Flemish grandfather and great-grandparents, and all the other branches of his family and his wife's family, were lifelong Catholics without any “mala raza” (bad races) in their family trees. He spent years and a decent amount of money to secure the proper baptismal and marriage documents from Spain, Flanders, and Italy. There’s no question that Lázaro would view me, his distant multiracial and Jewish descendant, with disgust. So I share this ancestral history with wonder, but not necessarily admiration.
A "job application" for the Inquisition is disturbing to read but a goldmine for genealogical facts. Three of Lázaro’s grandparents were 100% Spanish, but his maternal grandfather, Juan Francisco Cornelis, was baptized on May 20, 1687 in Sint-Joriskerk (St. George’s Church) in Antwerp. Juan’s parents, Eduardo Cornelis and Anna Portiers, were married on January 13, 1689 in Sint-Joriskerk and eventually moved to Cádiz, Spain, the eventual birthplace of Lázaro. Juan was born to unwed parents, but their subsequent marriage legitimized their son in the eyes of the Church, including the Inquisitors weighing Lázaro’s “purity.”
That was all I knew about the Cornelis family until I tried entering their names into Full-Text Search. Within seconds, I found that the AI-powered index had access to protocolos (notarial records) from Cádiz, and within minutes I found the 1727 will of Eduardo Cornelis and the 1730 will of Juan Francisco Cornelis!
Eduardo Cornelis, my probable 8th-great-grandfather and coincidental namesake, shared a nice amount of autobiography in his will, saying he married in 1687 or 1688 (his uncertainty is telling, given his son’s birth predated his nuptials), his son was born in Antwerp and his daughter was born in Brussels. Eduardo came to Spain in 1690 and his wife Ana followed in 1692. For decades he was a Cádiz merchant and he founded a partnership with his son-in-law, Diego Van Havre, in 1719. If you search Eduardo's and Diego's names in Google and Google Books, they are footnotes in academic studies on Cádiz's 18th-century maritime trade and its foreign-born merchants.
Because Spaniards of the time were obsessed with proper lineage, wills started off with the testator listing parents' names and origins. Juan Francisco Cornelis wrote that his father, "Eduardo de Cornelis," was from "Amberes" (Antwerp in Spanish), and his mother, Ana Portiers, was from Brussels. Eduardo Cornelis's will is a little hard to read, but he listed himself as "D.n [Don] Eduardo de Cornelis, de nación flamenco, natural de la ciu.d [ciudad] de Amberes, Ducado de Bravante, vecino y hombre de negocios de esta de Cádiz, hijo legítimo de D.n Herman de Cornelis y de D.a [Doña] Anjela Crocquet, su mujer difunta..." — Don Eduardo de Cornelis, of Flemish nationality, native of Antwerp, Duchy of Brabant, resident and business of Cádiz, legitimate son of Don Herman de Cornelis and Doña Anjela Crocquet, his deceased wife! These are my probable 9th-great-grandparents.
You'll notice that there's an AI-generated transcription to the right of the images. This first page of Eduardo's will has a number of lacunae, but subsequent pages have nearly the entire text automatically transcribed. When I'm dealing with Full-Text Search results, I copy all the pages' transcriptions, plug them into an AI chatbot, and it does a decent job of transforming an error-ridden text into a coherent and mostly accurate summary. Here is the start of Claude.ai summarizing Eduardo's will:
I notice there are two errors: Eduardo's wife Ana is given the last name "Cortés," because that is more common in Spanish than "Portiers." AI also deduced that Eduardo wanted to be buried "in the habit of the Vera Cruz religious order," when in reality the document reads "el hábito de la Seráfica religión" — referring to the Franciscan order. Indeed, I found a number of 18th century male Colombian ancestors who requested in their wills to be buried in a Franciscan habit, following the belief that St. Francis could intercede on behalf of the dead wearing his order's habit. So AI is a great start at interpreting difficult documents, but details need to be double-checked.
Now that I had the names Herman Cornelis and Angela Crocquet, I entered them into Google Books Search and was shocked to find that their tombstone still exists, in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp! And multiple books have transcribed it!
The translation is roughly:
D.O.M. [Deo Optimo Maximo, or "To God, the best and greatest"]
Indeed, Rubens came back to Antwerp in 1630 after nine years of diplomatic work in France, Spain, Holland, and England, and the "Mr." refers to his having a degree, most likely the honorary Master of Arts degree he received from Cambridge University in 1629. The "Jubilaris" after Herman Cornelis indicates he was marking a significant anniversary, perhaps 50 years in the confraternity? This is not my 9th-great-grandfather but possibly a close male relative? At the very least, a Cornelis was a colleague of Rubens!
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Through Google Books, I learned that my ancestor Herman Cornelis was a landowner in the area of Berchem, once a town south of Antwerp that is now absorbed into the city. One source describes his property as a kasteel (castle), but it seems more likely to have been a country estate. Another 1874 source describes the land as a farm by the Malines road and the "Vieille-Route" [Old Road], which appears in a 1662 map by Verbiest as "de hofstede van Cornelis" (the farmstead of Cornelis). The house is depicted on the map as having turrets, and therefore it was commonly called Torentjes (Little Turrets). The 1874 book says the property's recent owner had developed and enlarged the property, so it seems Cornelis's house was already gone or rebuilt by that point.
Full-Text Search (via Claude.ai summarizing the Dutch transcript) probably found when the Cornelis family sold the Torentjes farmstead: a court record from Berchem dated May 14, 1714 describes the sale of a house with a courtyard, stables, a tenant's house and barn, and 6.25 bunders (apparently 15-16 acres) of land. Herman Cornelis's property was divided among his children on October 25, 1685 — nearly 7 months after old Herman's death — and his daughter Constantia got the farmstead.
Another record found through Full-Text Search says that a "pleasure garden with annexed lands" (hoff van plaisantie melle annese landen) in Berchem was sold by the Cornelis family in 1717. Claude.ai says the property consisted of 2 bunders (about 5 acres), and included hedges and canals, a tenant's house, courtyard, and an orchard. The record says that Jacques Cornelis appeared on behalf of his brother "Don Eduardo Cornelis," who resided in Cádiz and granted power of attorney in 1707! It also mentions their older half-brother Herman, who had died in 1701, their sister Constantia Cornelis who married Joannes Marinus Gelthoff, and two dead siblings, a nun named Beatrice Cornelis and Angela Cornelis, wife of the late Mr. Hermanus Elinck, who had served as an advocaet (lawyer) on the grooten raede (Great Council of Mechelen, supreme court for the Habsburg Low Countries).
The 1717 record also mentions the heirs of a sister of the elder Herman Cornelis, Maria Cornelis (died 1675), who was married to the merchant Jacques Pincquet (died 1673). Jacques Pincquet is likely the same man as "James Pinquet," an Antwerp merchant mentioned in 1650s documents as trading in Cádiz and Antwerp. English records list Pinquet shipping goods like "one tunne of fflemish yarne" and "one packett of Antwerpe lace." Maria Cornelis and Jacques [Jacobus] Pincquet share a gravestone on the floor of Sint-Joriskerk.
Jacques Cornelis (1655-1750), the longest-living of Eduardo's siblings, climbed the social ladder by marrying a noblewoman, Anne-Marie Lernout, Dame de Soucx (died 1734). He took on his wife's surname and title, becoming Jacques Cornelis, dit Lernout, the Seigneur de Soucx, and was made a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire in 1716! His son, another Jacques Cornelis, dit Lernout and the 2nd Seigneur de Soucx, died in 1789 in Bruges without issue, but his daughter, Jeanne-Constance-Joseph Cornelis (died 1752), married another seigneur and had issue.
I wondered if I could find baptism records for Herman Cornelis or Angela Crocquet. Sure enough, the Belgian archival site AGATHA (agatha.arch.be) uploaded in June 2025 digitized indexes of baptism records and original baptism records from the Cathedral of Our Lady! The 17th-century Dutch handwriting is in atrocious secretary hand, but with the help of a guide to decipher letters from 17thCenturyDutch.com(!), the records seem to follow the format:
[Child's first name] [Father's name] [Mother's name] [Godparents' names]
So far I've found Jacobus Cornelis, baptized on May 16, 1604; Maria Cornelis, baptized on March 10, 1607; Hermanus Cornelis, baptized on June 16, 1609; and Susanna Cornelis, baptized on December 27, 1614. All four are the children of Jacques Cornelis and Maria Godefrin! Maria's baptism record helped me decipher the words, when I noticed the matching mother and daughter Marias. It seems that Jacobus and Hermanus had godmothers with the last name Godefrin as well — aunts perhaps? There was also a "Jacques Cornelis" who was served as Capelmeester of the Cathedral of Our Lady in 1601! So are these the children of my 10th-great-grandparents?
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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