Joseph Lejuene at the John Cockerill Statue in Seraing, Belgium

I was in Brussels Belgium for a conference last week and found myself with a Friday free, so Yeongmi and I took a trip to Liege, Belgium in the heart of Wallonia.  Before the trip my mother emailed me this photo of an ancestor of mine, Joseph Lejuene, who was from Liege.

After a long Google search I found the following entry at Wikipedia on John Cockerill, an industrialist who was responsible for building one of the first ironworks and a mechanical engineering companies in Seraing, Wallonia on the Meuse River, a few miles upstream from the city of Liege.

The statue in the photograph is a memorial to him and is located in front of the city hall in the town of Seraing.  Cockerill's grave is just in front of the statue.  The statue faces north toward the river, and on the northwest side of the pedestal is an iron statue of an ironworker that Joseph Lejuene posed for in the late 1880's.

Photo from the same spot taken on Oct. 2, 2015

Yeongmi and I arrived at the site around noon after taking a train from Brussels to Liege and then a taxi from the train station in Liege to the city hall in Seraing.  I had a note written out in French to tell the driver where we wanted to go.  He spoke no English and we spoke no French, so I am sure he was a bit bewildered about why these strangers were traveling all the way to the city hall just to take photos of an obscure statue.

Anyway here are some photos that reveal what my mother's father's mother's mother's father looked like in his prime.

My note for the taxi