In Louisiana most family names of French origin were introduced by people of the Catholic faith coming from France, Canada, or Acadia (Nova Scotia). The French surname De Ville, however, for the most part appears to have had a much different provenience. Most people of that name in the state today probably descend from one Michel De Ville, born about 1738 in South Carolina, son of a French-Swiss Protestant, Louis De Ville, who, with others of his faith, was recruited to settle in the Carolina colony during the 1730s.* The date of son Michel's arrival in Louisiana is uncertain, but it was probably just prior to his marriage to Marguerite Kantenburg of the German Coast, in New Orleans, 1768.

One of the first permanent settlers of the Rapides country in central Louisiana, Michel obtained from the Spanish authorities a land grant on Bayou Rapides, west of the military post (present Pineville on the Red River, opposite Alexandria).

There all of his children were born, including five sons (Nicolas, Louis, Valentin, Étienne, and Jean), who were to carry on the De Ville name in central and south-central Louisiana. On Bayou Rapides, Michel De Ville became a successful planter (probably tobacco), and on his death in 1793 he owned two sizable tracts in the area, worked with eleven slaves.

Unfortunately, church and civil records of early Rapides Post were destroyed by fires in Alexandria during the nineteenth century; thus tracing of the De Ville families in Rapides Parish and elsewhere in central Louisiana prior to the Civil War is almost impossible. We might assume that sons Nicolas, Valentin, and Jean were responsible for the growth of the De Ville clan today represented by families in Alexandria, in northeastern Rapides Parish (especially the community called Deville), and in neighboring Catahoula and Avoyelles parishes.

About 1800 sons Louis and Étienne moved from Rapides to the Opelousas country.

There they began the south-central Louisiana branch of the De Villes, which today forms the largest concentration of the clan in the state. (More than a third of the state's De Ville households now live in Evangeline and St. Landry parishes.) Judging from land claims made after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, both Louis (m. 1802 Marie Jeansonne) and Étienne (m. 1801 Marie-Louise Vasseur) settled in the Prairie Faquetaique north of present Eunice, then the western part of old St. Landry Parish.

Church records suggest that practically all of their descendants remained in that general area for most of the nineteenth century, although a few members, especially descendants of Étienne, lived in the Grande Prairie district north of Opelousas.

Owing to incomplete or badly transcribed published records, not all of the nineteenth century De Ville families of old St. Landry can be traced with certainty from either Étienne or Louis. But by the end of the century the latter's male descendants (4 sons, 15 grandsons, 10 great-grandsons) far outnumbered his brother's (2 sons, 3 grandsons, 1 great-grandson).

During the mid-eighteenth century another De Ville family, unrelated to that discussed, appears to have been present in New Orleans.

This probably was the De Ville de Goutin de Bellechasse family, some of whose members were prominent in New Orleans political and military affairs during the Spanish and early American periods of Louisiana. Possibly the De Villes listed in the nineteenth century directories of New Orleans and some of those now living in the city may descend from the de Goutin De Villes