Quebedeaux, including its many variants, seems to be a uniquely Louisianian surname.* Today it is rare, if not completely lacking, in France and French Canada.

It first appeared as a family name during the 1740s at Fort de Chartres, one of the French posts along the Mississippi River in Illinois, where a Joseph Quebedau dit I'Espagnol and his wife Marie-Anne-Antoine Beau, both from Paris, France, lived and reared several children.

Joseph's nickname, "I'Espagnol," indicates that he was a Spaniard originally named Quevedo, which was later Gallicized to Quebedau.

At least two of Joseph's children moved to Louisiana, probably in the 1760s-daughter Marie-Françoise (married to Nicolas Provost) and son Charles, who possibly accompanied his sister and brother-in-law on the trek southward.

Settling with his relatives on False River in Pointe Coupee, in 1776 Charles married Marie-Catherine Recuron, a native of the area,6 and thereby became the progenitor of all the Quebedeauxs who now live in Louisiana and southeastern Texas.

Probably discouraged by lack of opportunities in the Pointe Coupee area, during the mid-1790s Charles and his family moved to the northern part of the Attakapas, where his four sons married and established their own households.

Sons François (m. 1810 Célestine Lagrange), Toussaint (rn. 1813 Marie-Barbe Frossart), and Jean-Zénon (m. 1817 Émérante Marks) eventually settled near Bayou Teche in the vicinity of present Arnaudville.

François and Jean-Zénon and many of their descendants lived east of the Teche on the wide, fertile floodplain between the bayou and the Atchafalaya Basin.

Toussaint and his progeny probably settled in the same area, and it may be reasonable to guess that the Quebedeaux families who today reside between Opelousas and Lafayette (and who comprise a fourth of the state's Quebedeaux households) all descend from those three brothers.

Nicolas Quebedeaux, the elder son of progenitor Charles, after his marriage to Marguerite Landry in 1803 established a farm on the upper Bayou Vermilion east of present Carencro.

During antebellum days his four sons (Nicolas, Jr., Dennis, Joachim, and Lessin) and their families settled along bayous and coulees within the Attakapas prairies in what is now Acadia Parish. After the Civil War, and perhaps before, the brothers, as pioneer small farmers, had obtained land along the upper Bayou Queue de Tortue east of present Rayne, along Bayou Wikoff near Roberts Cove, along Bayou Plaquemine Bruleé north of the site of Crowley, and along Bayou des Cannes near the present town of Evangeline.

Thus, Quebedeaux families, practically all descendants of Nicolas, were well established in Acadia Parish many years before irrigated rice cultivation began in the 1890s, which attracted so many French Louisianians into the southwestern prairies. During the 1890s several Quebedeaux families had migrated to Mermentau, Jennings, and Lake Arthur,13 and the first two decades of the present century saw their further movement into western Calcasieu Parish and southeastern Texas