(French, German) One who took care of a flock, a shepherd; dweller on, or near, a mountain.

The surname Bergeron has a wide distribution and a complex history in southern Louisiana. * People of that name arrived early in the French colony; a Jean-Baptiste Bergeron from Illinois (originally from Canada?) was living with his family in New Orleans in 1725.

Sometime before 1740 Guillaume Bergeron dit St. Onge, a soldier in the French marine, was stationed at Natchitoches but later settled in Pointe Coupee.

In the 1760s several Bergeron families came to Louisiana from Acadia, settling in St. James Parish. Little is known of the early New Orleans Bergeron, but most of the households of that name in the state today probably can trace ancestry either from the Bergerons of Pointe Coupee or from those of St. James Parish.

Guillaume Bergeron dit St. Onge was one of the pioneer settlers and probably the main progenitor of the Bergeron families of Pointe Coupee. While stationed in Natchitoches he married (1740) Agnès Renaudiere of Kaskaskia Post, Illinois.

The couple migrated to Pointe Coupee before the birth of their first child (1744), and by the late 1740s Guillaume had become an established planter on False River.

His wife bore him five sons: Georges (m. 1801 Gertrude Patin), Pierre (m. 1771 Marguerite Moreau), Louis (m. 1770 Angélique Bizette), Joseph (m. 1772 Marie-Louise Bizette), and Étienne (m.

1781 Françoise Olinde), all of whom during the last quarter of the eighteenth century reared large families in the False River section of Pointe Coupee.

Possibly discouraged by lack of opportunity in the parish, during the 1810s and 1820s several of Guillaume's grandsons and great-grandsons began to move into the Opelousas and Attakapas areas.

For example, sometime before 1819 grandson Pierre, Jr., and his family settled along the Teche and by the 1850s most of his descendants were living near Vermilionville (present Lafayette).

Again, grandson Joseph, Jr., settled near Opelousas, and after or possibly before the Civil War his descendants were congregated around Church Point, southwest of Opelousas, and near Arnaudville on Bayou Teche.

Today some 60 Bergeron households are still in Pointe Coupee; in recent times many may have moved into Baton Rouge.

Most of the Bergeron families of Louisiana stem from the Acadians who settled in St. James Parish, many of whose descendants migrated from there to Bayou Lafourche and into Terrebonne Parish, where 28 percent of the state's total now reside (300 households in Houma alone).

At least five Bergeron families were among the first Acadians to arrive in Louisiana, probably in 1765.

Three brothers, Jean-Baptiste, Charles, and Germain, sons of Barthélemy Bergeron dit d'Amboise of Port Royal, Acadia, were settled in St. James by 1766.

Another Bergeron Acadian household, headed by Catherine Caissey, widow of Jean-Baptiste who died in the Attakapas in 1765, was also living in St. James at that time with two sons, Jean-Baptiste, Jr., and Jean-Charles, and two daughters.

Of the three brothers belonging to the Barthélemy branch, Germain had moved to the Lafourche by 1789,13 but Jean-Baptiste, Charles, and most of their descendants remained in St. James;14 however, before 1820 a son of Charles, Jean-Théodore, had moved to the Lafourche near Thibodeauxville.

Of the Jean-Baptiste-Catherine Caissey branch, the two sons, Jean-Baptiste, Jr., and Jean-Charles, had migrated to the Lafourche by 1795. In the early 1800s sons and grandsons of all the Bergeron migrants to the Lafourche began to move down-bayou below Thibodeauxville; some were among the earliest French settlers along the upper Bayou Terrebonne.

The area around Houma became a center of Bergeron families, and after the Civil War some members began to move down the Terrebonne toward Montegut, down the Petit Caillou toward Chauvin, and northward up the Chacahoula Bayou, settling mainly as small farmers.

Others eventually made their way along Bayou Black into the lower Teche