Although there are now only some 350 Lirette households in Louisiana, this clan exemplifies some interesting aspects of surname geography and history. Today the Lirettes are concentrated in a single parish, Terrebonne, where 70 percent of the families live in and around Houma and along Bayous Terrebonne, Petit Caillou, Grand Caillou, and du Large. Moreover, this concentration lies in the area initially settled by the Lirettes 200 years ago, indicating a strong reluctance to migrate, even in recent times. Finally, the present-day Lirettes apparently all descend from a single family that emigrated from France in the late eighteenth century.

The origin of the first Lirette family in Louisiana is problematical. In 1784 a Jean-Pierre Lirette of Nantes, his wife Marie-Madeleine Durambourg, and two small daughters are listed among the Acadian exiles in France who had elected to emigrate to Louisiana.* However, Lirette or Liret is nowhere documented as an Acadian name.

Apparently Jean-Pierre, a young French seaman living near or with the Acadians in Nantes, ca. 1781 married Marie-Madeleine Durambourg, daughter of Jean-Baptiste Durambourg, a French navigator of Cherbourg and his Acadian wife, Madeleine Henry.

Although himself a non-Acadian, Durambourg and his family did sail with a group of Acadian exiles from France to Louisiana in 1785 aboard the St. Remi, but the name of his son-in-law, Jean-Pierre Lirette, does not appear in any of the ship lists of the 1785 Acadian migration.

Nonetheless, the Lirettes must have arrived in Louisiana with that migration, for the records of Ascension Church (Donaldsonville) indicate the baptism of their first son, Nicolas, in 17865 and two years later his family was settled along Bayou Lafourche on land adjacent to that of his father-in-law.

Jean-Pierre and Madeleine Durambourg reared at least twelve children, but only two were sons: Nicolas (bt. 1786) and Jean-Pierre, Jr. (b. 1800).

By the time of his marriage to Céleste Hébert in 1819, Jean-Pierre, Jr., was living along the Lafourche near Thibodeauxville; there, most of his sons and grandsons remained well into the nineteenth century.

Nicolas (m. 1807 Marie Malbrough), however, sometime before 1820 had established his family along Bayou Terrebonne near Houma,9 and most of the present-day Lirettes of Terrebonne Parish probably descend from him. The three sons of Nicolas-Alexandre (m. 1834 Clémentine Guidry, 1838 Marie-Angélique Gautreaux), Jean-Henri (m. 1835 Marie Domingue), and Bélony (m.

1842 Mélasie Boudreaux) became farmers and planters along Bayou Terrebonne as far south as Montegut,10 and some of their descendants may have settled along Bayou Petit Caillou as well.

Of the three sons, Alexandre was the most prosperous.

By the early 1850s he had acquired the Bayou Cane plantation consisting of 350 acres of improved land in sugarcane along Bayou Terrebonne above Houma and later obtained another plantation down-bayou near Montegut.

Owning 53 slaves in 1860, Alexandre Lirette was considered one of the major sugar planters of Terrebonne.

Despite the difficulties imposed during the Reconstruction Period, Alexandre and his sons were able to maintain their holdings after the Civil War; in the late 1880s his son Edgard had taken over the Bayou Cane plantation, while son Léo managed that of Orange Grove near Montegut.

The Lirettes have had little inclination to move away from their small homeland in Terrebonne Parish. Opportunities in industry and services around New Orleans may have attracted a few families, but none appears to have moved to the growing industrial area along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans or to southeastern Texas