I’m from Holland. Isn’t that veird?

Here is an interesting story from my maternal line. I’ve worked on researching this, but I’ve come up empty.

Charles Van Price (Van Parijs) was born in the early 1800s and came to U.S. in 1874. He traveled to Dousman, Wisconsin in Waukesha County. He worked for Mr. Dousman, later moved to Little Chute, Wisconsin, then to Phlox, Wisconsin in 1887. While staying with his daughter, Effie, in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1922, he went grocery shopping for her and was never seen again. After investigating, it was assumed that he returned to Holland from Milwaukee. He sold his land earlier, and was now one of the wealthiest men in that part of the state. His daughter found he had withdrawn all his savings (a very sizeable amount) and probably left for Europe. They traced him to Antwerp, Belgium — then all trace was gone. He was never heard from again.

I’ve worked on researching Belgium and Holland after 1922, but I haven’t run into anything. The main problem with Charles is that 1) Most genealogy searches don’t work well with two-word last names 2) I’m not sure if I should look for Van Price (Americanized) or Van Parijs.

I actually found the Van Parijs line by complete accident. I was looking for information on the Van Price line, but I always hit a brick wall. I had happened to find something that mentioned that “Parijs” was sometimes written as “Price” in America. So, I searched for Van Parijs and ran across a Dutch Genealogy website. It turns out that this website was a treasure trove of information from the exact area that my dutch ancestors came from, Zeeland in the Netherlands. From there I found information going back many generations.

I know that “Van Parijs” roughly translates into “of Paris” in French, so I’m wondering if this family came from France, since I have traced them back into Belgium. It just keeps going, doesn’t it?