Most of the Ardoin families in Louisiana probably descend from the French Canadian, Étienne Ardouin of Montreal, and his wife Marie-Josephe LaPointe. The couple first settled in Detroit in the early 1770s, where three of their children were born: Étienne, Jr. (1771) and twins Joseph and Agnès (1773). * Sometime later the family moved down the Mississippi River to the Illinois country, residing probably at Kaskaskia Post, where son François and three daughters may have been born.

From there Étienne moved again, this time down river to Pointe Coupee, arriving probably in the late 1770s or early 1780s.

There the children married, François moving prior to 1796 into the Grande Prairie area of the Opelousas District, while his brother, Étienne, Jr. (m. 1794 Marianne Recuron), remained for a time in Pointe Coupee on a small tract of land on False River.

By 1810 Étienne, Jr., too, had come to Opelousas and later migrated to the Attakapas District, where his male line died out early.

In contrast, François and his wife, Louise Quebedeaux, produced a brood of eight boys and seven girls, each of the males (except one who died young) in turn begetting from eight to thirteen offspring.

By the 1870s twenty families (sons and grandsons) directly descendant from François comprised practically the entire Ardoin clan in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes.

As nearly all baptisms and marriages of this prolific group were recorded in the churches of Opelousas, Ville Platte, and Eunice, we might assume that at the time most of the families resided in those vicinities, the very area where the Ardoins are concentrated today; however, in 1850 two Ardoin families were recorded living in the Calcasieu area far to the west: those of Étienne (m. 1843 Émilie Guillory) and David (m. 1826 Denise Lafleur), both sons of François and Louise Quebedeaux.

Probably most of the Ardoins during the past century were petits habitants, farming small holdings, or working as sharecroppers, though likely some were engaged in the cattle trade.

During the late 1880s and early 1890s several Ardoin families, accompanied by other French-speaking habitants, left the Ville Platte and Eunice areas to take up residence around Iota in Acadia Parish and near Jennings, Welsh, and Lacassine in what is now Jefferson Davis Parish.

The boom in rice cultivation in southwestern Louisiana was just beginning; new opportunities as planters or as laborers on rice farms and in mills probably attracted many small farmers from the crowded areas of Evangeline and St. Landry parishes. Although most of the rice cultivation was in the hands of Anglo-Saxon migrants from the Midwest, the towns of Welsh and Lacassine on the Southern Pacific Railroad between Jennings and Lake Charles were places favored by many French Louisianians. In 1889 two Ardoin brothers had sixty acres of rice ready for harvest near Welsh.

By 1896 there were five Ardoin families in Lacassine, three in Welsh, and a few others along Bayou Serpent, Bayou Chine, and Liberty Ridge farther north. Later movement westward into the Lake Charles area and southeastern Texas, and migration to the cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, would complete the present-day distribution of the Ardoin families in Louisiana