Historically Pointe Coupee and Avoyelles parishes formed the traditional centers for Gremillion families in Louisiana. But today less than a fourth of the state's households of that name remain in those areas, most of the rest having migrated to the adjacent cities of Alexandria and Baton Rouge and to New Orleans.

The sole progenitor of all of Louisiana's Gremillions was one Louis Gremillion dit Sans Quartier, a native of Courcival near Le Mans, Maine Province, northwestern France.* Louis arrived in Louisiana sometime before 1747, the date of his marriage to Marie-Josephe Robillard in St. Charles Parish, where their first child was born two years later.

By 1752, or perhaps earlier, Louis and Marie-Josephe were established in Pointe Coupee;3 there they reared a large brood of thirteen children, only six of whom survived to adulthood, including two sons: François-Louis (m. 1779 Perrine Bersa) and Charles (m.

1786 Marguerite Recuron, 1797 Jeanne LeGay).

In 1766 the family was living on a farm of 4 arpents frontage on the Mississippi River at Pointe Coupee.

Both sons also acquired land nearby, François having enlarged his father's holdings on the Mississippi, whereas Charles by 1798 had purchased an 8 x 40 arpent (270 acres) tract on the island side of False River.

By his first wife Charles Gremillion sired four sons (Charles, Jr., Maximilien, Cyprien, and Paulin) and by his second wife, two sons (Marcel and Sosthene), all of whom remained in the Pointe Coupee area, most on the island side of False River.

Several sons apparently were fairly prosperous farmers, for in 1820 Charles, Jr., owned twenty slaves, Cyprien and Maximilien, seven each, and Paulin, nine.

Most of the Gremillions who today live in Pointe Coupee (mainly in New Roads) probably trace ancestry to Charles and his offspring.

A few years after François' death (ca. 1810) his widow, Perrine Berza, in 1815 moved the entire family to the Avoyelles prairies, and through her four sons, all of whom married into the Rabalais family, began the Avoyelles branch of the Gremillion clan in Louisiana.

The elder son, François, Jr. (m. 1801 Émilie Lejeune in Pointe Coupee, 1815 Eulalie Rabalais in Avoyelles), produced a large progeny, as did sons Valérien (m. 1813 Émilie Rabalais), Cyprien (m. 1816 Clémence Rabalais), and Martin (m. 1819 Marie Rabalais).

The family firs settled between present Marksville and Hessmer,11 but several decades later (1870 to the 1880s) the Gremillion descendants had moved farther south, living mainly on small farms along Bayous Choupique and Jack near Cottonport and Plaucheville, along Bayou des Glaises near Moreauville, and along Bayou Rouge near Evergreen.

Although some of the Gremillions owned a few slaves in antebellum days, most appear to have been subsistence farmers; but after the Civil War some were producing rice and sugarcane as commercial crops.

From ca. 1900 on, large numbers of the clan left the farm for nearby cities and towns to engage in the professions and business.

Today well over a third of the Gremillion households in the state reside in Alexandria, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, and several have migrated as far as Shreveport, Lake Charles, and Houston