The surname Ledet (Leday) historically has occurred mainly in two areas of southern Louisiana: the Teche-Opelousas district and the Lafourche-Terrebonne area.

That concentration holds today with 45 percent of all the Ledet families in the state living in the latter area, whereas only 15 percent reside in the former, from which many probably have moved to southeastern Texas. The some 130 Ledet families currently in New Orleans are probably migrants or descendants of migrants from the rural parishes.

Because of inadequate records, the Ledet families of the Teche-Opelousas area have proved difficult if not impossible to trace historically. The first known individual of that surname to arrive in Louisiana (ca. 1750) was Jean-François Le Dée, a native of L'lsle (Lille) in northem France.* In 1762 this merchant-stockman purchased a large tract of land with its livestock in the Attakapas prairies between the Teche and Vermilion bayous2 and later (1769) added to his holding a sizable grant issued by the Spanish government.

After his death in 1785 his ranch of some 50 square miles was divided and auctioned to several individuals.

It is thought that he did not marry and left no heirs.

Other instances of the surname are found in late eighteenth century records of Opelousas Post, e.g., Louis Ledé and wife Marie-Anne Trahan (1793), Paul Ledé and wife Madeleine Quibedeaux (1798);6 however, available documents reveal no links between these and later nineteenth century Ledet families in the area. In both the Teche and Opelousas districts numerous instances of the name Ledet occur in baptismal and marriage records dated prior to the Civil War among free people of color.

Such indications, of course, ceased in documents dated after the War, but the antebellum records suggest the origin of the large number of black and mixed-blood Ledet or Leday families in the Opelousas and Lafayette areas of today.

In contrast, the history of the Ledet families in the Lafourche-Terrebonne area is fairly clear. Most of them can trace their ancestry from a single progenitor, Antoine Le De, a native of Île-de-Ré, coast of west-central France, who migrated to Louisiana probably in the 1780s, settling near present Edgard in St. John the Baptist Parish (second German coast).

There, in 1788, he married Marguerite Willig who bore him four sons (Antoine Jr., Pierre-Marcellin, Henri, and Jean-Pierre) and one daughter (Josephe-Augustine). By 1795 Antoine Sr and his family had moved to Bayou Lafourche, where they were recorded in the census of Valenzuela (a settlement near present Plattenville) of that year.

After the death of his first wife, Antoine remarried in 1797 to Victoire-Françoise Quimine, by whom he had three more sons (François-Claude, Aléxis-Amand, and Auguste-Isidore) and three more daughters-a brood of eleven children in total. During the early years of the nineteenth century all of the Ledet sons and their families (and probably Antoine, Sr., himself, who died in 1825) eventually settled in the vicinity of Thibodeauxville,12 some below the village around Lafourche Crossing, others on the upper Bayou Terrebonne. Son Jean-Pierre, and his wife Marie-Josephe Roger formed most of the Terrebonne branch of the Ledets, their sons and grandsons settling as far south as Montegut and Pointe-aux-Chênes before the Civil War.

The descendants of son PierreMarcellin and the youngest son, Auguste-Isidore, formed the lower Lafourche branch of the clan, reaching Raceland and Lockport in the 1850s, Larose by the 1870s.

By 1890 the seven sons of Antoine, Sr., had given their father 20 grandsons and 26 great-grandsons to perpetuate the Ledet name in southern Louisiana