Jean-Baptiste Trudeau

Jean-Baptiste Trudeau was of the first generation of the Trudeau family born in North America. He was the sixth son and seventh child of Etienne Trudeau and Adrienne Barbier, baptised on the 11th of April 1680, at Notre Dame de Montreal with his Uncle Charles Barbier godfather. "barbe barbier", an aunt, signed the baptismal entry. Jean Baptiste was one in a family of twelve brothers and one sister, Marie, who lived to adulthood. There may have been another sister, Louise, who died young.

On the 25 of May, 1701, at the age of twenty-one years, Jean Baptiste signed a contract to canoe out to the Outaouais. Later that same year on the 10th of September he paddled down to Detroit by way of Lake Erie. He may well have been in company with his future father-in-law, Joseph Parent, and the latter's family. It seems that Joseph Parent made several trips back and forth. On March 9, 1706, Parent contracted as brew master at Detroit and brought his fourteen year old daughter there to reside with the family. Jean-Baptiste Trudeau would remain single until this girl matured to take her for his wife. That year of 1701 was when Sieur Antoine de Ia Mothe Cadillac and party established Fort Pontchartrain, at Detroit, in his effort to capitalize on the fur trade. Some claim that Cadillac started the settlement of Detroit, but there was a settlement of Metis there long before 1701, and probably a settlement of Indians before that. Jean Baptiste came later to Cadillac's village with his brother Joseph, who was a carpenter, and there bought the fonner property of LaMontague dit Pierre Mouet, which Pierre had purchase from Cadillac for four livres, ten sols for rent, plus ten livres for other rights. On that first trip Jean-Baptiste, apparently, did very well trading with the Indians. His brothers, Pierre and Toussant, also were making trips fur trading to the west. His brother Francois moved to Louisiana in 1704 and there became one of the prominent settlers of Old Mobile, establishing the French on the Gulf of Mexeco. April 2, 1707, twenty-seven year old Jean Baptiste Trudeau, with his two younger brothers, Joseph and Laurent, arrived at Detroit at the same time as Francois Benoit dit Livemois and Robert Janot dit Lachapelle. Jean-Baptiste finally returned to Montreal to carry on his trade of master blacksmith, and to raise a family, the latter of which did not prove too well. He was thirty-five years old when he married twenty-three year old Marie-Madeleine Parent. It was three years before the birth of their first child and of their ten children, six died at birth or as infants. The seventh child, Joseph, was one that did survive to become our ancestor. Jean-Baptiste lived into his eighty-fifth year, outliving his wife over twenty-eight years.

He died June 16, 1764, at Terrebonne, just north of Montreal. He had lived through the glorious days of adventure, the expansion of his country over most of North America, the struggle of New France with Indians and the English, to see it fall, fmally, into the hands of the British. By this time his name-sake grandson was sixteen years old, educated and ready to take his place in the fur trade and history of the west, but this time it was in the Spanish Missouri Country.

http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/m/c/c/Robert-W-Mccracken...