Although the patronym Babin was represented in early eighteenth-century Louisiana, * most families of that name in the state today probably descend from Acadian refugees who entered the colony during the late 1760s.

These families came from Maryland, where they had been exiled after the 1755 expulsion from their homeland.

Five arrived in 1767, all being settled at St. Gabriel on farm plots along the east bank below the Spanish fort located just down-river from Bayou Manchac.

The year following, five more Babin families from Maryland came to Louisiana;5 initially destined to settle near Natchez, these folk soon obtained land near their compatriots in the Acadian Coast (St. James and Ascension parishes).

By 1770, nine Babin families were living along the Mississippi River in Ascension and St. James.

Examination of baptismal and marriage records of the Baton Rouge Diocese revealed that by 1800 the number in that area had grown to nearly forty, mainly through natural increase.

As it was with many other Louisiana colonists of the eighteenth century, the Acadian Coast became the "hearth" for the establishment of the Babin surname in the state.

Although several Babin families and other small farmers along the Mississippi began to migrate from the Acadian Coast after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, most stayed. Some sold their fertile river-bank holdings to newly arrived Americans who wished to form large plantations, only to move a short distance inland wherever high ground occurred, as in Ascension Parish around present Gonzales.

As late as 1850 nearly half of the Babin households in the state were concentrated in Ascension Parish, and today about 20 percent still reside there.

Prior to the Civil War several Babin families had acquired modest sugar plantations along the river. The largest holding of the clan was owned by Paul P. Babin on the west bank upriver from Baton Rouge; in 1860 it contained 800 acres of improved land and a steam-powered mill; it was worked with 100 slaves. Most of the Babins, who, at the start of the twentieth century still retained land and planted cane along the river, eventually moved into Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

The few Babins who left their initial center on the Mississippi during the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries went either to the Bayou Teche in the Attakapas country or to Bayou Lafourche. In the 1770s Joseph and Ignace Babin, sons of Dominique, an early Acadian settler on the Mississippi, acquired land in the Grande Prairie district near St. Martinville in the Attakapas.

Apparently Ignace left no male heirs, but Joseph and wife Anastasie Melançon were the progenitors of most of the Babins who live in the Teche area today.

One of the first Babins to move to the Lafourche was Firmin and his family, reported there in 1789.

By 1812 several other Babin families had left the Mississippi River for the Lafourche, and in the 1820s some were settling around present Thibodaux and even as far south as Bayou Terrebonne.

Descendants of these pioneer families make up the considerable number of Babin families who live in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes today (more than 25 percent of the Babin households in Louisiana)