Before telling you about the Van Landschoot family history, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my uncle Leon Van Landschoot for his dedication to this project. He took it upon himself to track down the history of the Van Landschoots, and his wife later provided me with all the files needed to reconstruct our family’s past. It took me about seven years to put all these names and details into a genealogy program, and another seven years to trace Van Landschoot families in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, France and the United States, adding more than eight thousand names and bringing the total to well over eighteen thousand.

There is a general index for each surname, and the information includes all Van Landschoot name variations, although only five of them are still in use today. I have been able to locate eight branches. Eeklo has two, with descendants in Belgium, Michigan and France. The branches of Adegem, Maldegem and Kleit share a common ancestor, and from this area came most of the emigrants to the United States between 1851 and 1925, to Canada between 1903 and 1925, and to France between 1870 and 1920. The first Van Landschoot families arrived in Taos, Missouri, as early as 1847. There is also another branch in Knokke and Moerkerke, sharing the same ancestor around 1650, with descendants who later emigrated to Missouri, Michigan, France and Canada. In recent years, others have emigrated to England and Mexico. The Van Landtschoote family of Knokke has a different ancestor.

This family tree is not only the work of the compiler. Special thanks must go to all the people who have contributed to my research. The information presented on this website is the result of many years of research by Hans Van Landschoot and his late uncle Leon Van Landschoot (1917–1980) of Maldegem, Belgium. I have always continued to treat this as a hobby, with no promises to anyone about the final product, but with the determination that one day I would achieve this goal.

Special thanks to the Family members in Argentina

Special thanks to this group

Special Thanks to Family members in the USA

Volunteers of RAOGK

Volunteers of RAOGK — Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness — also helped tremendously:

• Miller Irma of Creston, Union County, Iowa
• Steve Peterson of Moline, Rock Island County, Illinois
• Barbara Kelly of Moline, Rock Island County, Illinois
• Cindy Collins of Geneseo, Illinois
• Margaret Fleming of Dubois, Pennsylvania
• Yvonne of Tennessee
• Debby Kohl of Iowa

They carried out extensive research for me and helped obtain documents and information on Ambrose Van Landschoot of the Maldegem group, as well as on descendants of Paul Van Landschoot of Brugge, Belgium, who later settled in Fremont Township, Iowa.

At the start of Leon Van Landschoot’s genealogical research, he systematically noted all forms of the name (Van)Land(t)scho(o)t(e), together with every imaginable spelling. These spellings were gathered from birth, death and marriage certificates, as well as numerous parish registers. He checked complete registers of the province of East Flanders and parts of West Flanders from about 1600 up to 1900, as far as they were present in the state archive. All these data were first written on cards and later processed by me into a genealogical computer program.

During my own research, I have added information from notarial deeds, census records, passenger lists and other historical documents. Over time, genealogy became more than an interest. I had always been fascinated by my ancestry, and since my uncle Leon had already laid important foundations, I decided to continue the work. I realized that nobody, as far as I knew, had documented the Van Landschoot family as a whole. I felt that someone should gather this information and preserve it, making it available to all members of the Van Lan(d)(t)schoot(e) families, and that somebody might as well be me.

I purchased a copy of Family Tree Maker version 1 in June 1994, and after several upgrades up to version 7.5, I decided to buy a new genealogy program, The Master Genealogist. This program offered far more possibilities. The genealogical information could now be read in Dutch, French and English, so that everyone would have the benefit of reading it in his or her own language.

This website contains a one-name genealogical study concentrating on the name Van Landschoot and its variants, such as Van Landschoot, VanLandschoot, Landschoot, Landscoot, Van Landtschoote, Van Landschoote, Van Lantschoot, VanLantschoot, Van Lanschot, Van Lantschot and Lantschot. The Van Landschoot family originated in Belgium, more specifically in the Meetjesland area, with Eeklo as its capital. The family was settled primarily in the triangle Eeklo, Knokke and Brugge.

In addition to direct ancestors, the database includes spouses, siblings, their ancestors and related families. This site documents all of my research to date. I use the word family in its widest sense, because I have included all the people I have come across, however tenuous the link may sometimes be. It now contains more than seventeen thousand three hundred names and over three thousand pictures and documents, including birth, marriage and death records, World War One draft cards, census records, passenger lists, newspaper obituaries, in memoriam cards, last wills and much more.

Feel free to explore also the Dutch pages with general information. They include dates, places, names and many more useful references.