Represented by nearly 2,000 households, Bourgeois is one of the more common names of French origin in Louisiana today. It is also one of the earliest, there being two unrelated families of that name mentioned among the first extant records of New Orleans. One family was headed by Nicolas-Charles Bourgeois, a native of Paris, who arrived in New Orleans sometime before 1721 and who, in 1731, was farming land with his second wife, Marie-Josephe Tarau, opposite the city along the river.* Little is recorded on the descendants of this family, save the mention of three sons by the first wife, Anne La Vasseur (d. 1725): Laurent, George, and Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste.

The other family was begun by Jean-Baptiste Bourgeois, from the village of Paliseau near Paris, who arrived in Louisiana in 1718, married Marianne Chevalier, and eventually settled in St. Charles Parish.

There, his three sons, Dominique, Joseph, and Jacques, became important planters during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Joseph acquiring a farm of some 400 acres; he and his brothers purchased other properties in adjacent St. John the Baptist Parish,4 where some of their descendants may still live, whereas others migrated to Bayou Lafourche and the Attakapas in the late 1790s and early 1800s.

Probably most of today's Bourgeois families, however, trace ancestry from Acadian refugees of that name who came to Louisiana in the mid-1760s. At that time at least nine Bourgeois men from Acadia settled on the east bank of the Mississippi in St. James Parish.

Some already had families, others married later. Five were brothers (Paul, Joseph, Michel, Pierre, and Jean-Baptiste), sons of Paul Bourgeois and Marie-Josephe Brun of Beaubassin, Acadia, and the remaining four, probably related, also hailed from the same area.

From this group of Acadians evolved a number of successful sugar planters of St. James Parish in antebellum times, some of whom continued operations after the Civil War.

For example, Nita Plantation, near Convent, was owned by a Bourgeois family until 1894.

Beginning in the late 1790s, St. James Parish became a center of emigration for the less affluent Bourgeois families, who, like other small farmers of the area, were looking for better opportunities in the less crowded Lafourche and Attakapas districts. By 1795, three sons of the original Acadian families of St. James were living on Bayou Lafourche: Michel and Jean-Baptiste (sons of Joseph) and Pierre, Jr. (son of Pierre, Sr., and Marie Bergeron).

By 1820 many more Bourgeois sons and grandsons had made the move from St. James to the Lafourche, most settling down-bayou from Thibodeauxville.

During the 1850s an increasing number of baptisms and marriages among Bourgeois families were being recorded in the Raceland and Lockport churches, and during the 1870s in Larose Church, indicating settlement near those places.

Unlike other families of French origin, few members of the Bourgeois clans chose Terrebonne Parish for homes, although in the 1850s and 1860s some were found near Houma and along Chacahoula Bayou to the northwest.

At least three sons of the original Acadian Bourgeois families in St. James in the early 1800s elected to migrate to the Attakapas; Simon (son of Joseph Bourgeois and Marie Giroir) and Joseph (son of Pierre, Sr., and Marie Bergeron) settled along the Teche north of St. Martinville while Louis (son of Michel Bourgeois and Anne Landry) homesteaded on the Vermilion River near present Lafayette.

In addition, a member of the St. Charles Bourgeois clan, Jean-Baptiste, and wife Marie Borel by 1794 was living along the Teche south of St. Martinville; by the 1840s his descendants had migrated farther down the bayou to the vicinity of Charenton and Franklin.

A striking feature of the present-day distribution of Bourgeois families in Louisiana is the concentration in New Orleans (475 households) and Baton Rouge (150), the two cities accounting for a third of the state's total.

Likely, the influx into New Orleans began after the Civil War and increased with the city's growing industrialization after World War I . Bourgeois's into Baton Rouge may date from the rise of the petrochemical industry in the late 1940s