The Patins were among the early French colonists in Louisiana. In 1727 Antoine Patin, a carpenter, was living in New Orleans on Bourbon Street with his wife and four children.* Possibly this man was the Antoine Patin dit Bellair, a native of Dauphiné Province in southeastern France, who by 1739 was settled at Pointe Coupee with wife Gasparde Emonette and family.

At Pointe Coupee there was still another early Patin, apparently unrelated to Antoine, named Bernard-Louis Patin, for many years the public notary there, a native of Besançon, eastern France, and married to Marie-Catherine Olivo;3 available documents give no information on the offspring of that couple.

Antoine Patin dit Bellair probably was the progenitor of most of the Patins who live in Louisiana today. Before his death in 1747 he had become a respected planter (tobacco and foodstuffs) in the Pointe Coupee area.

Among his children were three sons: Étienne, Jacques, and Antoine, Jr.

Étienne married Adrienne Rondot in 1747, and most of his descendants apparently remained in Pointe Coupee Parish as planters. Jacques (m. Marie-Louise Barré ca.64) by 1766 had moved to Opelousas Post where he became a successful farmer and cattleman;6 his son Jacques-Alexandre (m. Céleste Allain in 1793), after appointment by Spanish authorities as lieutenant in the Royal Legion of the Mississippi River, moved to the vicinity of Baton Rouge, where he acquired land on the west bank of the river in what was then part of Iberville Parish.

Possibly some of the present Patin families of Baton Rouge descend from Jacques-Alexandre.

Antoine Patin, Jr. (m. 1745 Marie-Anne Rondot, 1750 Marguerite Mayeux), like his brother Étienne, remained most of his life in Pointe Coupee.

Probably aided by inheritance from his father, by 1766 Antoine, Jr., was one of the leading planters and stockmen of Pointe Coupee, with 14 slaves, 80 cattle, 50 sheep, and 20 pigs.

His son by his first wife, Jean-Joseph (m. Marie-Auguste Porche, 1769), helped to carry on the Patin name in Pointe Coupee, whereas a son by his second wife, Antoine III (m. Catherine Bossier, 1774), in the late 1770s had removed to Opelousas and by the late 1780s, to the Attakapas.

There, he and his four sons, Marcel, Joseph, Onésime, and Ursin, began the Patin families of the Bayou Teche country,11 where today over 40 percent of the state's total reside. Baptismal and marriage records suggest that Antoine III and three of his sons (Marcel, Joseph, and Onésime) established their families in the Grande Pointe area along the east bank of the Teche, east and north of present Breaux Bridge.

Many of their descendants have remained in that area to this day, although others had moved northward toward Grand Coteau in St. Landry Parish before the Civil War.

Son Ursin, however, settled farther south, probably along the Vermilion River near present Lafayette.

Most of the Patins of the Teche country likely were small farmers, but Antoine III by 1788 claimed about 1000 acres of prairie and swamp east of the Teche as a vacherie, or cattle ranch.

Not until the mid-nineteenth century were any of the Patins of the Teche engaged as sugar planters, and then only on a medium scale.

With the rise of the petroleum industries since the 1940s many Patin families of the Teche have moved into Lafayette; others have sought work in Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, and southeastern Texas. Many Patins who now live in New Orleans may be relatively recent migrants from the countryside, but others may descend from nineteenth-century New Orleans families whose history is little known