Avoyelles Parish has been the center of the Ducote surname in Louisiana for the past two centuries. Today a third of the Ducote families in the state still reside there, and substantial migrations to the cities of Alexandria, Baton Rouge and New Orleans (which now contain another third of the Ducote households) probably has occurred only in the past 50 years.

All of the Ducotes of Louisiana apparently descend from a single progenitor-Piene Ducosté (Ducoté) dit Coureur, who was one of the numerous French ''coureurs de bois," or trader-trapper-woodsmen active in Louisiana during the early eighteenth century.* Born about 1691 in the French-speaking part of Flanders, Pierre was trading in the Pointe Coupee area in the 1730s.

He first married an Indian woman called Antoinette and by 1745 had settled down as a farmer in Pointe Coupee, growing tobacco, corn, and beans with the help of several slaves.

There is no record of children from his first marriage, but after Antoinette's death in 1747 Pierre married Marie-Madeleine Cable (Kabel) of the German Coast.

From that union two known children were born, Pierre, Jr. and Marie-Madeleine.

By 1766 Pierre, Sr., then age 75, had become a planter of modest means in Pointe Coupee, owning a farm of seven arpents frontage, eight slaves, and several head of livestock.

Married to Henriette Rabalais in 1773, Piene, Jr., carried on the Ducote name, producing eleven children, including six sons, four of whom are known to have survived to adulthood.

In the 1780s Piene, Jr., and his family moved from Pointe Coupee to the Avoyelles Prairies, some 50 miles to the northwest.

At that time the Avoyelles area was being pioneered by several families from Pointe Coupee, including Pierre's in-laws, the Rabalais, whom he probably accompanied.

It is not known with any certainty in what part of the Avoyelles the Ducote family first settled, but it was likely in the vicinity of present Mansura, near the colonial military post. Four of Pierre's sons took wives in the Avoyelles (Joseph, m. Clémence Mayeux; Jean-Piene, m. Élizabeth Laborde; Henri-Zénon, m. Claire Laborde; Célestin, m. Constance Gagnard).

All produced sizable families, each having seven children by the early 1820s and probably several more each thereafter.

As the Ducote descendants multiplied they must have taken up land along the many streams of the Avoyelles, from Indian Bayou in the south to the Red River in the north. It is known that in 1811 Joseph, the elder son of Pierre, Jr., claimed land along the Red River north of present Marksville.

Most of the Ducotes, however, appear to have clustered in the Marksville-Mansura-Cottonport district for most of the nineteenth century, all making their living as small farmers. The U.S. Federal Census of 1850 listed 27 Ducote households in Louisiana, none of which lived outside Avoyelles Parish.

In the 1890s, however, at least one of the clan — Joseph, son of Jacques Ducote and Marie-Thérèse Revillion-moved to Lafayette Parish, where he married Caroline Martin.

The few Ducote families (25) who reside in Lafayette Parish today may descend from that union