Today well over half of the Meaux households in Louisiana are concentrated in Vermilion and Lafayette parishes, within or near areas first settled by families of that name two centuries ago. Probably all Meaux families in the state today descend from a single progenitor-Michel Meaux of St. Onge (Saintonge) Province, west-central France.* Although the year of Michel's arrival in Louisiana is uncertain, he likely settled in the Attakapas shortly before his marriage to Élizabeth Broussard of Acadia at St. Martinville in 1770.

Michel established his home on the Vermilion River (probably downstream from present Lafayette), where he reared a sizable family, including four sons, before his death in 1784.

He also became a prominent stockman, raising cattle in the adjacent prairies, an occupation that most of his descendants followed well into the nineteenth century.

Each of Michel's four sons married Acadian women and established stock ranches along the Vermilion River, their herds grazing on the extensive prairies in what is now Vermilion Parish.

Michel, Jr. (m. 1802 Constance Duhon) and Athanase (m. 1804 Émilie Mercier) each reared only one son to help carry on the family name; Pierre (m. 1801 Modeste Hébert, 1813 Céleste Broussard) had two sons; but François' (m. 1802 Constance Broussard) four sons and their descendants were the ones mainly responsible for extending the Meaux name into the northern part of Vermilion Parish during the nineteenth century.

By the 1870s, 15 of François' grandsons had formed households in the Vermilion prairies north and west of Abbeville, nine of them fathered by son David from his two marriages (1832 Joséphine Faulk, 1842 Nathalie Lormand).

As early as 1816 the four Meaux brothers, sons of progenitor Michel, claimed a total of 3,200 acres of prairie west of the Vermilion River; but because they lacked proper documentation, their claims were not confirmed by the U.S. government.

Apparently many early settlers of the area utilized the open prairie as common land without firm titles to particular tracts. Of the four brothers' descendants probably only some of those directly related to Pierre owned land east of the Vermilion River; church records suggest that prior to the Civil War Pierre's son, Pierre, Jr., had settled in the Côte Gelée area southeast of present Lafayette.

Likely many of the Meaux families that currently live in and around Lafayette belong to Pierre's branch of the clan.

During the last half of the nineteenth century subsistence farming and small-scale ranching became the main source of livelihood for most French-speaking families in the Vermilion prairies, cultivation being limited to the more fertile soils along the bayous.

After irrigated rice cultivation was introduced into southwestern Louisiana in the late 1880s, many small farmers in Vermilion Parish, including several Meaux families, changed from subsistence to commercial agriculture. For instance, Adam Meaux, a sixth generation member of the clan, ca. 1900 started rice cultivation on his land near Kaplan, where he had been living since the late 1880s. Subsequently other Meaux families migrated farther westward, one having reached near Creole in present Cameron Parish by 1880.

During the first half of the present century opportunities in industry and rice farming induced other Meauxs to move with many other Louisiana French into southeastern Texas

A location name in Yorkshire Or from the French, Mieux; a personal name.