All Duhon families living in Louisiana today descend from Acadian refugees who arrived at various times during the last half of the eighteenth century. The progenitor of the Acadian Duhons was Jean-Baptiste Duhon dit Lyonnais (of Lyon, south-central France) who settled in Acadia shortly before marrying Agnès Hébert at Port Royal in 1713.* After the Expulsion of 1755, Jean-Baptiste's large family, like most Acadian households, was torn apart, some members being exiled to England and then to France, others scattered along the Atlantic seaboard of America, and still others held prisoner for many years at Halifax.

Of Jean-Baptiste's ten sons, three who had been imprisoned with their families in Halifax reached Louisiana in 1766, and two of his grandsons who were born in France arrived with the 1785 migration of Acadian exiles.

By 1766 sons Honoré (m. ca. 1742 Anne-Marie Vincent), Charles (m. ca. 1756 Marie-Josephe Préjean), and Claude-Amable (m. ca. 1757 Marie-Josephe Vincent) and their families had settled along the Mississippi in the Acadian Coast (Ascension and St. James parishes).

Only the descendants of Honoré, however, remained along the river, the others migrating eventually to the Attakapas.

The antebellum Duhon families of St. James Parish, such as those of planters François and Séverin, descended from one of Honoré's sons, Jean-Baptiste (m. 1770 Anne LeBlanc).

Various members of the Duhon clan began to move from the Mississippi to the Attakapas in the 1770s and 1780s. Those included the families of the original settlers, Charles and Claude-Amable, as well as Joseph Duhon, who with his brother Jean-Baptiste came to Louisiana in the 1785 Acadian migration from France.

(Both were the sons of Cyprien Duhon, who had been exiled to England and France, grandsons of progenitor Jean-Baptiste Duhon dit Lyonnaise).

Later, ca. 1800, François Duhon dit Petite (son of Honoré), his wife Elizabeth Landry and children, joined his relatives in the Attakapas.

All settled along or near the Vermilion River close to the present site of Lafayette, which has remained the main center of Louisiana's Duhon families for the past 200 years.

Today a fourth of the total Duhon households in the state live in Lafayette Parish.

Subsistence farming and cattle raising were the probable occupations of the Duhons in the Attakapas.

Church records suggest that before the Civil War many families had moved southward into Vermilion Parish north of Abbeville.

As early as the 1840s, however, some of the more adventurous members had gone into the Calcasieu prairies as cattlemen. For instance, Jean-Sarazin (m. ca. 1846 Marie-Célinise Faulk) and Joseph-Camille (m. ca. 1846 Marguerite-Émilie Ellender), both grandsons of the Acadian exile Joseph Duhon from France, were running cattle, probably west of the Mermentau River.

Moreover, the 1850 U.S. Census listed seven Duhon families, some "graziers" or cattlemen, others "planters" in the Mermentau district of the Calcasieu.

By the 1880s several Duhon families had settled as cattle people on the cheniers within the coastal marshes east of Creole in present Cameron Parish.

Despite the loss of the civil and church records of Lake Charles by fire, there are indications that Duhons were in that area as early as the 1860s.

The 1880 U.S. Census recorded fourteen heads of families in Calcasieu and Cameron parishes, respectively.

Later migrations were made into southeastern Texas, where today nearly 140 Duhon households live in Orange, Beaumont, and Port Arthur and vicinities