♂Jean Baptist Renault Deslaurier

Jean Baptist Renault Deslaurier (born 1 October 1708) was a French Canadian from the St. Lawrence valley who went west to the post of Vincennes on the Wabash, where he married and raised a family in the 1750s. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Louis Renaud dit Deslauriers (1759–after 1815).

Early life

He was born and baptised on 1 October 1708 at Boucherville, on the south shore opposite Montréal, the son of Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers and Anne Prévost. Within two years the family had moved a few miles downriver to Varennes, where his younger brothers and sisters were baptised. His mother died before 1718, and in May of that year his father, then described as a widower of Varennes, married Marie Anne Pinault of Verchères. The second marriage brought more children, among them another son named Jean Baptiste, born in 1728.

Vincennes

By 1750 he had left the St. Lawrence for Vincennes, then a French post in the Illinois country, attached to Louisiana. On 26 October 1750 the banns of his marriage were published at the parish of St. Francis Xavier there. The register calls him “of the parish of Varennes” and his bride Thérèse Mallet the daughter of Antoine Malette and Thérèse Mailhot, of the parish of Ville-Marie (Montréal). He was about forty-two; she had been born at Détroit and was about fifteen. Young brides were not unusual at the western posts, where French women were few, but a gap of more than a quarter-century was still uncommon. The marriage record names his parents as J. B. Renault and Marie Anne Prévost.

The couple’s children were baptised at Vincennes, among them a son Jean Baptiste in 1754, who married there in 1779, and Louis, born on 14 May 1759, through whom the family line runs.

Notes

A family chart compiled in 1994 gave his birth as 1 October 1710; the Boucherville register gives 1708. No record of his death has been found.