(French) Of the Wood [see Buss - in Dict.]

Dubois is a common surname in France and French Canada but occurs less frequently in Louisiana, where its present distribution reflects a complex history. Several Dubois, individuals and families, were present in Mobile, Biloxi, New Orleans, and Natchitoches as early as the 1720s.* However, lack of continuous records precludes the tracing of later Dubois families in Louisiana to these early arrivals.

Today the Dubois families living along the Cane and Red rivers between Shreveport and Alexandria probably can trace ancestry to soldier Jean-Baptiste Dubois, a native of Issoudun, province of Berry in central France.

He arrived in New Orleans in 1741, was garrisoned there until fulfillment of his term in 1747, and sometime thereafter made his way to Natchitoches Post. There he married Marie-Jeanne-Josephe Clairemont, also of Issoudun, in 1751 Two of his three sons, Jean-Baptiste-François and Antoine-Philippe, remained with their families north of Natchitoches Post at Grand Écore, where both claimed several large tracts of land along the Red River.

The third son, Valentin-Jean-Baptiste, and his wife, Rose Chelette of the German Coast, settled in the late 1780s near Rapides Post (present Pineville opposite Alexandria).

The history of settlement by the Dubois clan in the Lafourche and Attakapas areas of Louisiana is confusing at best. Apparently one of the earlier Dubois settlers of the Lafourche was Jacques-Olivier Dubois, native of Cherbourg in Normandy (but of Acadian descent), who arrived in New Orleans in 1785 aboard the Amitie, one of the seven vessels that brought in that year some 1,600 Acadian refugees to Louisiana from France.

Although only a boy of 14 years, Jacques-Olivier married Mane Michel of St. Malo soon after arrival, and the two were settled on the Mississippi near present Donaldsonville.

When grown, their three sons, Marcellin, Silvain, and Zénon, married and moved to the Attakapas in the 1820s, settling around Vermilionville (present Lafayette) and what is now Youngsville.

Their sons and grandsons stayed in the same area, but in the 1890s many families began to move westward to Abbeville, Rayne, and Iota in Vermilion and Acadia parishes.

Pierre Dubois of Vannes, Brittany (unrelated to Jacques-Olivier) was an earlier arrival in the Attakapas, there marrying Julienne Dartez of St. Martinville in 1797. The two settled in the Vermilionville area, producing a family of eleven children. Three of their five sons (Piene, Jr., Philémon, and Rosémond) by the late 1850s had married and moved to the Abbeville area, where many of their descendants live today.

The other two sons (Lucas and Oliver) and their descendants apparently remained around Vermilionville.

Two other unrelated Dubois families came to the Lafourche area, their offspring migrating from there southward into Tenebonne Parish. In the 1790s François Dubois of Paris and his wife Marie-Madeleine Bertrand are recorded as having settled in Assumption Parish.

One of their sons, François-André, born in 1798, married Genèvieve Derocher and by 1824 were among the pioneer farmers along Bayou Tenebonne.

Many of the present-day members of the Dubois clan in Tenebonne Parish likely descend from that family, whose sons and grandsons had settled as far as Montegut by the 1870s.

The other Dubois family, Olivier and his wife Rosalie Thibodaux (provenience uncertain) in the early 1820s were settled near Thibodeauxville, where they reared their twelve children, some of whom were living on Bayou Black in the 1860s and 70s;14 others settled on the lower Lafourche near Lockport.

The many Dubois families that lived in New Orleans in the nineteenth century may have descended from colonial antecedents, but others probably were recent immigrants from France or from parts of the United States. An example of the latter was Olivier Dubois, born in New York state, who migrated to New Orleans in 1823, becoming one of the city's most respected citizens in the 1850s