Practically all of the Miguez families in Louisiana trace ancestry to a single progenitor-Juan Miguez, native of the province of Galicia, northwestern Spain. He, his wife Salvadora Guerrero, and two young sons in 1779 were settled with other Spanish colonists from Málaga and the Canary Islands in the Attakapas near the site of New Iberia on Bayou Teche.* Unlike the Seguras, Romeros, and others of the original Spanish colonists, who soon moved a few miles north to the shores of Lac de Tasse (Spanish Lake), the Miguez family remained for some time near the initial New Iberia site,2 probably ekeing out a precarious livelihood through subsistence farming.

After nearly ten years of such hardship, Juan and Salvadora moved to New Orleans to enjoy the more favorable environment of the "city," leaving their two grown sons, Salvador (m. 1799 Maria Dominguez) and Bernardo (m. 1801 María Romero), to continue life in the countryside.

Church records suggest that the sons settled eventually in the Petite Anse district, probably along the upper reaches of Bayou Petite Anse about 6 miles west of the New Iberia site.

There they engaged in both farming and cattle herding.

For much of the nineteenth century the Petite Anse district was the chief abode of the Miguez clan, all of Bernardo's eight sons and all but one of Salvador's four sons establishing farms in that vicinity.

Most of them having married local French-speaking girls, male members of the third generation Miguezes probably became thoroughly Gallicized in speech and custom. Before the outbreak of the Civil War some of their offspring had settled near the community of Lydia, southeast of New Iberia; others moved westward near present Delcambre; and still others migrated a short distance northward, purchasing land or sharecropping near Youngsville.

Rarely as prominent in public affairs as some of their neighbors of Spanish descent, such as the Romeros or Seguras, the Miguez families remained for the most part as petits habitants well into the present century. However, by the 1890s, two great-grandsons of Juan the progenitor-the brothers Antoine-Théomile and Daniel-Drauzin Miguez, both Civil War veterans of Derouen community, Iberia Parish-had become well-to-do cotton planters.

Today well over half of the state's 310 Miguez households reside in Iberia Parish, the clan's hearth for more than two centuries. During the past 75 years some Miguez families have migrated into southeastern Texas. A few of unknown provenience are found in northwestern Louisiana