Today in Louisiana the surname Buras (formerly Burat or Bura) is confined almost entirely to the New Orleans area and to Plaquemines Parish, where people of that name settled in the eighteenth century. Probably sometime during the 1720s a corporal in the French forces named Jean-Guillaume Burat (from the town of Saleure near Basel, Switzerland) disembarked at Mobile on the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, the name Burat does not appear in the published passenger lists of the ships that left French ports for Louisiana in the 1720s, * and according to one investigator, one of those ships, La Garonne, commanded by an M. Burat, never reached its destination.

Nonetheless, church records in Mobile reveal that in 1725 a corporal of Swiss origin named Jean-Guillaume Burat was married to Madeleine Roger, a native of La Rochelle, France.

Jean-Guillaume died in Mobile in 1736, but his two sons, Joseph-Guillaume (b. 1731) and Jean-Pierre (b.

1733) moved to the New Orleans area probably in the late 1750s or early 1760s.

Although Jean-Pierre may have been established temporarily at Pointe à la Hache in 1763, the two brothers later settled along the Mississippi about 15 miles below New Orleans at English Turn, where they and their families were recorded in the 1766 Spanish census.

By 1770 both families had moved farther downstream to the Pointe à la Hache area, at that time near the southern limit of agricultural settlement along the river.

There, as elsewhere along the lower Mississippi, land suitable for farming was confined to a narrow strip of high ground on either side of the river; Jean-Pierre obtained a small tract of 10 arpents (1,920 feet) frontage on the west bank while Joseph-Guillaume acquired 20 arpents frontage on the east bank.

Those two families appear to have been the progenitors of the Buras clan of Louisiana. For most of the nineteenth century their descendants remained along the lower part of the river in Plaquemines Parish. According to the U.S.

Federal Census of 1850, all but three of the thirty-three Buras families censused in the state lived in that parish,8 probably as small farmers cultivating subsistence crops and raising a few cattle.

Rice grown in the frequently flooded lands near the backswamp, was one of the food crops of the Buras families and their neighbors. Beginning in the 1850s this crop called "river rice," became the most important commercial product of Plaquemines Parish, and was grown as well in other parts of south-central Louisiana.

The Buras clan of Plaquemines was among the leaders in river rice production; for example, in 1872-73, seventeen Buras families living between the communities of Homeplace and Buras were engaged in commercial rice farming.

By 1900, however, the industry in Plaquemines had been eclipsed by the more efficient irrigated rice farms in the prairies of southwestern Louisiana, and many of the Buras families, together with their neighbors, began to drift into the New Orleans area to seek a more remunerative livelihood in industry and services.

Today more than half of the Buras families of the state live in New Orleans and vicinity; less than a third remain along the lower Mississippi, which for nearly 130 years was the home of the entire clan