Today nearly two-thirds of Louisiana's Cheramie families are concentrated along lower Bayou Lafourche in or near the towns of Larose, Cut Off, Galliano, Golden Meadow, and Leeville. Probably all of those families plus others of that name in neighboring areas of the state can trace ancestry to a single progenitor-Joseph Cheramy, a native of Mauron in Brittany. As Albert Robichaux has shown, Cheramy or Cheramie is not an Acadian name, as often thought, but one of Breton origin that can be traced to the late seventeenth century. * About 1783 Joseph Cheramy left his native town to live in Nantes, where he married an Acadian refugee girl, Anne Aucoin.

Although their names do not appear on the passenger lists of the Acadians who were transported from France to Louisiana in 1785, it is assumed that Joseph Cheramy and Anne Aucoin were on one of the seven refugee ships that arrived in New Orleans in that year; in 1786 the birth of their son, Joseph, Jr., was recorded in the Ascension Church in Chetimaches (Donaldsonville), indicating their presence in Louisiana at that time.

Anne Aucoin may have died in childbirth, for that same year Joseph took a second wife, Gertrude Michel, who bore him several children, including three sons, Joseph-Baptiste (b. 1787), Jean-Baptiste (b. 1794), and Zénon (b. 1797).

By 1788 Joseph Cheramie and his family were established on Bayou Lafourche as petits habitants, as were many other settlers of French and Spanish origin.

Later, in 1796, he obtained a large land grant of some 4,800 acres along the lower Lafourche about 60 miles below Donaldsonville, probably just south of present Larose7 — at that time a wilderness of swamp and marsh where cultivation was possible only on narrow strips of high land (natural levee) along the bayou banks. Perhaps before the beginning of the nineteenth century Cheramie may have moved his family into that wilderness, where hunting and fishing were as important as farming for subsistence.

During the first decades of the 1800s the Cheramie name was firmly established along the lower Lafourche, mainly through the progeny of Joseph's younger son, Zénon (m. ca. 1822 Delphie Dupré Terrebonne, 1837 Carmélite Plaisance).

Zénon Cheramie's four sons, Théodore-Lucien (m.

1843 Anne-Mathilde Orgeron), Zénon-André (m. 1846 Clémente Sevin), Joseph-Baptiste (m. ca. 1845 Marceline Sevin), and Antoine-Clément (m. 1854 Irma-Cécelie Mire) produced large families, Joseph-Baptiste rearing as many as six sons.

Church records suggest that many members of those families lived along the lower Lafourche between Raceland and Larose for most of the nineteenth century, but others of the clan may have subsisted as trappers and fishermen in the marshes below present Golden Meadow and Leeville and on the barrier beaches such as Cheniere Caminada and Grand Isle.

Concentration of Cheramie families in Golden Meadow and adjacent towns apparently did not begin until after the devastating hurricanes of 1893 and 1907 forced the coastal population to live farther inland. But probably the main inducement for the concentration was the establishment of commercial shrimping in Louisiana in the 1920s. Like many other French speakers, several Cheramies became shrimpers working out of Cut-Off, Galliano, and Golden Meadow.

During and after World War II others of the clan moved to the New Orleans area, attracted by jobs in industry and services