The Bonin families of Louisiana probably descend from a single progenitor-one Antoine Bonin dit Dauphiné, a native of Grenoble in southeastern France, a soldier in the French Army, who first settled near Mobile on the Alabama Coast probably in the early eighteenth century.

After being discharged from military service, in 1764 he, his wife Marie-Marguerite Sellier, and their seven children, together with other French families, moved from Alabama to Louisiana after France had ceded her Gulf Coast colony to England (Treaty of Paris, 1763).* Unlike his Alabaman compatriots, such as the Fontenots, Doucets, and Brignacs (most of whom settled near Opelousas Post), Antoine Bonin and his family went directly to the Attakapas, and by 1766 they had established a farmstead in the False Point (Fausse Pointe) area along the Teche, probably in the vicinity of present Loreauville, east of New Iberia.

His four sons, Jean-Louis, Paul, Antoine, Jr., and Jean, also established families in and around False Point, and many of their descendants continued to dwell in the same general district until the present time.

Today more than half of the total Bonin families in the state are concentrated in Iberia and Lafayette parishes with nearly 70 households living in New Iberia and vicinity. Thus that part of the Teche country has been the Bonin stronghold in Louisiana for more than two centuries.

Baptismal records indicate that of Antoine Bonin's four sons, Jean-Louis and his wife Marguerite Prince, an Acadian refugee from Maryland, were the major sustained of the Bonin name in the False Point area, with four sons and thirteen grandsons, all of whom produced large families.

The number of surviving progeny of all the Bonin sons and their descendants of that time might have been even greater had not infant mortality struck so frequently; according to available records, for some unknown reason, early deaths among Bonin children appear to have been more frequent than among those of their French neighbors.

Church records also suggest that few Bonin families left the False Point area until the mid-nineteenth century.

However, in 1811 and 1812, two Bonin brothers, Paul and Antoine, Jr., claimed land along Bayou Petite Anse north of Avery Island,7 and before the Civil War several Bonin families had established small farms in the prairies near present Lydia, south of New Iberia;8 others were probably living along Vermilion River near present Lafayette.

But it was not before the 1880s that a few Bonins ventured westward into present Acadia Parish in the vicinity of Rayne or moved down Bayou Teche toward Jeanerette and Charenton.

In the mid-1890s, one or two families had reached the developing rice country near Jeannings.

From the time of initial settlement in 1766, most of the Bonins in the Teche country were probably small farmers and stockmen. Only one (Louis-Alfred, a great-grandson of Antoine, the progenitor) was listed among the antebellum Louisiana planters (cotton) of the St. Martinville are.

Like other Louisiana families of French origin, during the first decades of the twentieth century the Bonins made their final movement into the industrial centers of southeastern Texas, especially Houston, and to New Orleans and Baton Rouge