♂Jean Baptiste Cardinal

Jean Baptiste Cardinal (christened 19 May 1728) was a French Canadian of Detroit who married there in 1755 and settled at Post Vincennes on the Wabash, where he was the first claimant of a fifty-acre tract “at the little rock” on the river. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Jeanne Marie Cardinal (1756–1822).

Life

He was the son of Jacques Cardinal and Jeanne Dugué, and was baptized at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 19 May 1728, the day he was born; an elder brother of the same name had died as a baby in July 1726. At his marriage his father was described as a bourgeois of Detroit: a settled townsman with property and the rights of the town, as distinct from the soldiers and fur-trade hands who came and went. Jean Baptiste was of age when he married Marie Anne Mallet at Ste-Anne, Detroit, on 8 April 1755. Their daughters Jeanne Marie (1756) and Marie Anne (1758) were baptized at Detroit.

Like his brother Nicolas, he moved to Vincennes, and his children Jacques, Geneviève, Jean Baptiste and Céleste were baptized there between 1761 and 1767. He was present at Vincennes in January 1773 for the marriage of his daughter Jeanne Marie to Joseph Seraphin Tougas dit Laviolette. On 17 December 1778, when the British retook Post Vincennes, he was one of the two militia captains still on the American payroll, and he laid down his arms to the British that day. A later survey of the old French and British land claims names him as the original claimant of fifty acres on the south-east side of the Wabash “at the little rock”; by the time of the survey the claim stood in another man’s name. No record of his death is known.