Although a few individuals called Dufrene (Dufresne) were living in Louisiana during the early 1700s, most families of that surname in the state today probably descend from several Canadians who migrated down the Mississisppi River in the last half of the eighteenth century.* In the 1770s three Dufrene families from Canada had made homes along the second German Coast (St.

John the Baptiste Parish): Louis of Quebec (who died in 1776, leaving no male heirs); François (son of François Dufresne and Marie Lachaussé of Montreal); and Charles (who may have been a brother of François).

François (m. Françoise Portier) and Charles (m. Marie-Anne Nadale) appear to have been the progenitors of most of the Dufrene families who lived in St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes from the late eighteenth century well into the present.

Descendants owned small properties along both sides of the river in the vicinity of Lucy and present Laplace in the Bonnet Carré district and in adjoining St. James, where some Dufrene families reside today.

In the 1790s another Dufrene family from Canada settled in Louisiana: Pierre, Sr., his wife Catherine Perillard, and their grown son, Pierre, Jr.

The son may have preceded his parents, for in 1790 he was living with the other Dufrenes of St. John the Baptist, whereas his elderly parents (aged 69 and 68) are first recorded as having settled along Bayou Lafourche in 1795.

By the time he married Marie Bischoff (of the German Coast) in 1797, Pierre, Jr., had joined his parents on the Lafourche,7 where he became the progenitor of most of the Dufrene families who now reside along the lower part of the bayou from Thibodaux to Leeville and probably some of those who are found along Bayou des Allemands in adjoining St. Charles Parish.

Pierre Dufrene, Jr., appears to have settled along the lower Lafourche below Thibodeauxville, and as early as 1798 possessed land on Bayou Terrebonne, probably near present Houma.

Judging from church and civil records, three of his sons, Jean (m. 1823 Mélanie Rome), Paul (m. Elisa Bourgeois), and George (m. 1833 Josephine Bourvier, 1839 Mélicie Miller) also settled and reared large families between Raceland and Larose on the lower Lafourche.

Many of their descendants may have settled even farther south toward the Gulf of Mexico, and a few Dufrene families were living at Cheniere Caminada before the hurricane of 1893.

The Dufrene clan on the Lafourche was reinforced by the migration of a son of François of the German Coast, Noël Dufrene, whose marriage to Reine Matherne in 1812 was recorded in the Assumption Church at Plattenville, as were the baptisms of their first-born, Hélène (1816), and Isidore (1819).

Later church records indicate that prior to the Civil War Noel's sons had settled among the Dufrenes of the Pierre line in the Lockport-Larose section of the Lafourche.

Today practically all of Louisiana's Dufrene households are clustered along the lower Missisisppi River near New Orleans and along the lower Lafourche. New Orleans alone contains 200 families, nearly a third of the state's total, most of them descendants of the Dufrenes who came from Canada more than 200 years ago. Unlike other French Louisianians, the Dufrenes did not take part in a western movement toward Texas during the last half century