In 1834, John's oldest sister Catherine moved to Green Bay in the Wisconsin Territory to teach at a newly-established Catholic parochial school there.
Their father and sister Mary Elizabeth ended up in Kaukauna, and after many years of political activity in Brown County and the City of Green Bay, brother Matthew would eventually retire there as well.
[2] In May, 1839 John Meade was among those residents of Wisconsin Territory who signed a petition to hold regional and then territory-conventions to nominate candidates for Delegate to Congress.
"The long shelves were loaded down with massive tomes containing the land descriptions and the history of each quarter section with maps and diagrams of hundreds of thousands of acres, and the corners were piled high with boxes and barrels of letters and documents, the accumulation of half a century....
Contemporary accounts differed as to what had happened to him, but his gold watch was missing, and locals asserted that he had been robbed and murdered, and that his body had been discovered under a pile of straw.