The French surname Bordelon is not common in either France or French Canada, but today in Louisiana and southeastern Texas there are more than 1500 households of that name.

All of these appear to have descended from one Laurent (Nicolas) Bordelon, a native of the French port city of Le Havre, who came to New Orleans ca.

1728 as an employee of the Company of the Indies. In 1730 he married widow Anne-Françoise Rolland of Paris, to whom two sons, Antoine and Nicolas, were born.* After Laurent's death in 1733, his wife remarried (to Jean Stephan dit Rocancourt) and moved with her children of former marriages to Pointe Coupee.

There Nicholas and Antoine Bordelon grew to manhood, married local women, and raised large families. Nicolas wed Adrienne Rondeau in 1753, living on an extensive plantation near present Morganza, but after the death of her husband in 1769, Adrienne sold the Pointe Coupee property and took her family to the Opelousas area, where two of her sons, Nicolas, Jr., and Michel, began the St.

Landry branch of the Bordelon clan.

Her third son, Hypolite, moved to Natchitoches Post in the 1790s where he started a lesser branch of the family.

Antoine Bordelon in 1759 married Marie-Anne Decuir, becoming a prosperous planter in the Pointe Coupee area.

Four of his sons by that marriage (Pierre, Antoine, Jr., Augustin, and François) and two more by a second marriage (Valéry and Zénon) all moved to the Avoyelles prairies in the late eighteenth century, there establishing the third and largest branch of the Bordelon clan.

To complicate the picture even further, another son of Antoine by his first marriage, Hilaire, decided ca. 1800 to move from Pointe Coupee to join his cousins in the Opelousas area.

The St. Landry branch began in the section then known as "La Prairie Basse" a few miles north of Opelousas Post, where widow Adrienne settled her brood in 1778.

Her son Michel and his descendants remained in that area, while Nicolas, Jr., settled in the "Grand Louis"

district between present Ville Platte and Opelousas, but claimed land farther north near Bayou Chicot.

Later, cousin Hilaire Bordelon settled along Bayou Cocodrie near the present community of Grand Prairie.

Members of these families were probably small farmers; none was reported to have had sizable cattle herds in contrast to many of their neighbors. By the 1850s some of the descendants of Nicolas, Jr., had moved to the Ville Platte-Eunice area11 and remained there probably until World War I, when western movement began into southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas.

The sons of Antoine Bordelon were among the pioneer settlers of the Avoyelles Prairies,12 an upland area largely free of the floods that often devastated holdings along the Mississippi River. About 1786 son Antoine II obtained from the Spanish Government a large grant of 50 x 40 arpents (ca. 1700 acres) probably near present Marksville.

His brothers, notably François, eventually acquired title to much of that land and later obtained smaller holdings along various bayous in what is now Avoyelles Parish.

Much later, ca. 1835, Léandre Bordelon, one of the sons of Nicolas, Jr., of Opelousas, migrated to the Avoyelles area to settle along Bayou des Glaises near present Moreauville.

One of his grandsons, Filmore Paul Bordelon, Sr. (1883-19-?) became a noted planter and cattleman (owner of Old Boy Plantation near Cottonport).

In 1850, 44 (73 percent) of the 60 Bordelon households of Louisiana censused by the federal government lived in Avoyelles Parish.

Today the parish contains only 30 percent of the state's Bordelon families, reflecting movement to the cities of Alexandria, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans