THE BELGIAN CONNECTION

In the spring of 1998 The Olde Forester had posted a page in his Iron History of Southeastern Ohio called "The Swedish Connection."

If you search for The Olde Forester in either Sweden or Belgium web sites you get over 2 million hits. Near the top is The Olde Forester because of his mention of the Sandvik bow saw still made at Sandvik, Sweden, along with other high quality metal tools.

Search for "Pierrou+iron+history" and you get a few million more hits because of the prominence of the Pierrou name in the development and history of iron in both Belgium and Sweden and in many technical and cultural things.

Knowledge builds bit by bit as your curiosity discovers facts and fits them together. That is the power of the web.

Much as The Olde Forester loves to discover the development of iron technology, he is also an avid, but rather inexperienced, genealogist. Emmett Conway married Myrtle I. Lundgren in 1940. He learned that her father, named Gustav Iver Lundgren had been born in 1879 in Valbo, Sweden, in an iron producing area. The strange thing was that while Iver Lundgren sounds Swedish, his wife, Myrt's grandmother's name, Amalia Pierrou, sounded French as can be.

Therefore, this page was really a genealogical search for Emmett's wife's grandmother's ancestry, because her name was Amalia Pierrou, French sounding, not Swedish.

The Quest is answered

The power of the WWW is such that within a month of posting this page, The Olde Forester had learned political history, economics, religious controversy, migrations and had found someone who had carefully researched the name of Pierrou in any of the ten or more ways it is spelled.
 
 

Patti Pjerrou-Paynter

That person is Patti Pjerrou-Paynter.

Thanks to Patti Pjerrou-Paynter, Seattle, Washington, who responded to the query. She provided us with a 24 page report called Pjerrou/Pierrou Family History From 1547 to 1997. Patti visited Belgium and Sweden and corresponds with a genealogical searcher in Sweden.

My wife's common ancestor was Smith Anders Pierrou, born in 1787 at Wittinge, Sweden.

Patti lives in a tree house in the suburb of Seattle and is a librarian in the public library.

Both Sweden and Belgium web sites are rich in iron making history on the web. You even find The Olde Forester's page because he wrote about using the Sandvik bow saws from 1948 on.

In searching for the root cause of the Belgium Connection to Sweden, you must first learn about the Walloons -- pronounced Valloons by the Germans. Websters big dictionary defines them thusly: "Walloon. a Race. One of the people, primarily of Celtic or Alpine, inhabiting southern Belgium, esp.-----adjacent parts of France. They are descendants of the Belgae. Their language, Belgium French. Walloon." In another place I read that the Romans called the people who lived on the west bank of the Rhine river "walla," hence "Walloons."

On one web site I saw that they were Romanized. The Olde Forester did study Caesar's Gallic Wars in high school. We memorized the first paragraph, "Quarum unum incollent Belgae," but remember nothing about iron making. No doubt the Romans exploited the capability of the Belgae to manufacture high grade iron.

Now we read that the old coal mines and iron furnaces are closed in Wallonia of Belgium. Modern businesses are tourism and hi-tech industries. Patti Pjerrou-Painter mentions a river kayaking site at one town where iron had been rafted to the market at Liege.

The Clean Air Acts have closed the book on many polluting industries.