Probably most, if not all, Derouen families in Louisiana descend from French-Canadian stock.* At least three Canadians named Derouen (Derouin, Drouin), blood related in various degrees, came to Louisiana in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, all settling in either Opelousas or Attakapas areas. One was Joseph Derouen, recorded as native of Quebec, who sometime before 1794 married Angélique Richard of St. James Parish and later settled near St. Martinville in the Attakapas; there, seven children were born, but unfortunately further information on that family is lacking.

Later, another Joseph Derouen (of Rivière du Chêne, near Quebec) in 1812 married Marie Ardouin of Pointe Coupee; settling near Opelousas, this couple began the relatively small Derouen branch of St. Landry Parish.

Still another Joseph Derouen of Canada (Joseph-François of Quebec, uncle of the Joseph who married Angélique Richard) was apparently the first of the three to arrive in Louisiana, marrying Geneviève Hébert of Acadia at the Ascension Church, Lafourche des Chetimaches (Donaldsonville) in 1775.

Beyond doubt, Joseph-François can be considered the progenitor of most of the Derouens living in Louisiana today. He and his wife moved to the Opelousas area, where by 1777 they had begun their large family and had acquired 90 cattle and 100 horses, assets of considerable value by the standards of those days.

A few years later, for reasons unknown, Joseph-François moved his family to the Attakapas, probably settling in the Petite Anse prairie south of present New Iberia.

That area was to become the main center of the Derouen families that descended from Joseph-François, who died in 1819 a age 85. His two sons, Joseph, Jr. (m. 1798 Mane-Solange Préjean) and Jacques (m. 1802 Mane-Charlotte Leleau) both reared large families in the same area, where stock raising was as important as subsistence farming;7 both brothers used cattle brands that had been in the family since 1780.

Joseph-François and Joseph, Jr., claimed several large holdings along Bayou Teche below New Iberia, and Jacques acquired land east of Bayou Petite Anse, just north of Petite Anse Island, now called Avery Island.

Joseph-François also claimed some 400 acres along Bayou Vermilion, probably upstream from present Abbeville, and later one of his grandsons, Aléxis Derouen, established an antebellum sugar plantation on the same stream, possibly near or on his grandfather's claim.

Other Derouens began to settle along the Vermilion near Abbeville in the 1850s, representing the first major migration of family members out of the New Iberia area. In the 1870s other members gradually moved southward along the Teche to the vicinity of Jeanerette and beyond to Cypremort Bayou in St. Mary Parish.

Judging from available church records, however, movement farther westward did not occur until the late 1880s and early 1890s, when several Derouen families began to join other French speakers in the communities of Jennings, Welsh, Lacassine, and Hayes in what was then the eastern part of Calcasieu Parish.

That movement probably took place in response to large-scale rice farming just developing in southwestern Louisiana at that time. The early twentieth century saw a continuation of the western trek of Derouens to the Lake Charles area and into southeastern Texas. Today, however, more than a third of Louisiana's Derouen households still live in Iberia Parish, where their forebears settled more than 200 years ago