First recorded in Mobile on the Gulf Coast during the first half of the eighteenth century, Latiolais is among the early family names established in the Louisiana colony.

Raymond-Guillaume Coquelin (de la) Tiolais, a native of Vichy, France, and a ship captain in the royal fleet stationed at Mobile, moved to New Orleans in the early 1740s, apparently settling on his plantation below the city near English Turn.* In 1769 his son Coquelin-Louis, born in New Orleans, married Julienne Barthe of the German Coast, where he purchased land adjacent to the parish church in St. Charles.

Three years later he and his wife sold the property, leaving the German Coast to setde along Bayou Plaquemine Brulée in the Opelousas District;3 there he began a long line of descendants, the modern members living within or near the area first occupied by their progenitor. Today 70 percent of the state's Latiolais households are found in the parishes of St.

Martin, Lafayette, St. Landry, and adjacent parts of Acadia Parish, forming one of the most compact clusters of related families of French origin in Louisiana.

Coquelin-Louis Latiolais was one of the pioneer settlers on Plaquemine Brulée, where he owned land near the site of Church Point; by 1777 he possessed a herd of 36 cattle and 3 horses.

Remaining in the same area, his younger son, Leufroy (m. 1811 Joséphine Daigle), fathered a family of twelve children, including three sons who also made homes in the Church Point district.

Likely most Latiolais residing in that area today descend from Leufroy.

Two other sons of Coquelin-Louis, Joseph (m. 1795 Françoise Nezat) and Léon (m. 1810 Victoire Robichot), both settled a few miles southeast of the Plaquemine Brulée district in what was then the northern part of the Attakapas.

Joseph obtained land probably along upper Vermilion Bayou north of present Lafayette, while Léon settled in the Grande Pointe area along the Teche near present Breaux Bridge.

Until the late 1890s practically all of the descendants of Léon made homes along the Teche between Breaux Bridge and Arnaudville, and probably most of the Latiolais who now live in that area are his descendants, as are many in Lafayette.

Likewise, most of Joseph's male descendants, although less numerous than those of his two brothers, remained in the area first settled by their forebear-the upper Vermilion district-and today probably contribute to the Latiolais population of Lafayette.

Although in the early 1800s all three brothers claimed land along the lower Bayou Queue de Tortue south of present Crowley,10 church records indicate that few of their male descendants migrated to that area. Unlike many French families that found homes in Opelousas and Attakapas areas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, few Latiolais took part in the later migration westward toward Texas.

Today less than 10 percent of the Latiolais households of the South reside in southeastern Texas or extreme southwestern Louisiana