(French), the Ox; also the Booby or Blockhead, (variant: de Toucheboeuf, Os, and de Belbeuf.)

In part because of fragmentary and often contradictory records, the history of the LeBoeuf families in Louisiana has been difficult to trace. Moreover, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the LeBoeufs appear to have been more migratory than most French-Louisianians, adding to the confusion in reconstructing lineages.

Most LeBoeufs of Louisiana descend from a Canadian ancestor-one Jacques LeBoeuf who, ca. 1667, left his native Geay, near La Rochelle, western France, to settle in Montreal.* His son Pierre (m. 1695 Marie-Françoise Auzon) gave him several grandsons, two of whom, Charles-Hyacinthe (b. 1712) and François-Dominique (b. 1719), migrated to Louisiana probably in the late 1740s.

Both settled as planters along the Mississippi in St. John the Baptist Parish.

Apparently discouraged with farming, in 1770 Charles-Hyacinthe (m. 1749 Marguerite Gaulois, 1752 Marie-Anne Marx) left the German Coast to become a hunter.

Thereafter his family's whereabouts is uncertain, but in the 1790s at least one of his sons (Simon) and perhaps two others (Charles and André) were hunters living along the Ouachita River in northeastern Louisiana.

François-Dominique (m. 1748 Madeleine Schmidt), however, remained in St. John the Baptist to become a successful planter and the main progenitor of the Louisiana LeBoeufs.

François-Dominique sired perhaps five sons, three of whom were instrumental in preserving the LeBoeuf name in Louisiana: Charles (m. 1779 Marie-Anne Frédérick), Pierre-Charles (m. ca. 1786 Madeleine Hymel) and Jean-Jacques (m. 1780 Marie-Madeleine Frédérick, 1782 Reine Matherne).

In the 1780s François-Dominique moved his family to St. James Parish, where his sons obtained land near present Vacherie.

A number of LeBoeuf families, chiefly descendants of Pierre-Charles, resided in St. James for most of the nineteenth century, and one of his grandsons, Ursin (m. 1830 Doralise Babin), retained possession of a sugar plantation on the west bank of the river opposite Convent until 1872.

During the 1790s Jean-François LeBoeuf, a son of Jean-Jacques by his first wife, left St. James with his spouse Geneviève Dubien and children to settle in the newly established Baron de Bastrop concession on the Ouachita River near present Monroe.

By 1818 his three sons had returned to southern Louisiana. Norbert (m.

1818 Ursule Rodriguez) and Eugène (m. 1820 Louise Leger) both settled in the Grand Coteau district south of Opelousas Post; there they established the St. Landry branch of the LeBoeuf family whose members during the last century made their homes between Church Point and Iota in Acadia Parish. The third son, Romain (m.

1818 Marie-Éloïse Rodriguez, 1825 Félonise Hébert) obtained land along the Lafourche near Thibodeauxville, and his sons and grandsons eventually settled in Terrebonne Parish near Houma and along Bayous Black and Chacahoula.

The most important ancestors of the Terrebonne LeBoeufs, however, were the sons of Jean-Jacques by his second wife, Reine Matherne-Jean-Jacques, Jr. (m.

1805 Marie-Jeanne Lirette) and Charles-Gabriel (m. ca.

1815 Rosalie Aucoin).

Both sons were early settlers along Bayou Terrebonne, and by the 1850s their sons had firmly established the LeBoeuf name from Houma to beyond Montegut.

Later in the last century LeBoeuf families took up land along Bayou Pointe-aux-Chênes and at Isle-à-Jean-Charles within the coastal marshes.

Today more than 40 percent of the state's LeBoeuf households are concentrated in Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes.

During the 1880s a few of the Terrebonne families moved into the lower Teche area and farther westward to the vicinity of Abbeville.

Their descendants, as well as some related to the St. Landry families, probably comprise most of the LeBoeufs who now live in extreme southwestern Louisiana and in southeastern Texas