Both Rodrigue and Rodriguez are frequent surnames in southern Louisiana, and being derived from the same orthographic root the two are often confused as to origin.

Most of the Rodriguez families of Louisiana probably descend from the Canary Islanders brought in by the Spanish government in the late eighteenth century, although some of that name may have changed the spelling to the French form, Rodrigue. Most of the state's Rodrigue families, however, appear to have descended from a single progenitor-Jean-Baptiste Rodrigue, a French Canadian from Quebec, who settled in St. John the Baptist Parish (second German Coast) in the 1760s.* Born at Beaufort near Quebec in 1736, he was the great-great-grandson of a Portuguese immigrant (Jean or João Rodrigues) who came to Canada from Lisbon (probably via France) in the mid-seventeenth century.

By 1766 Jean-Baptiste had married Marie-Josephe Dervain and had begun a family that grew to eleven living children before the death of the mother in 1785; that same year he remarried, to Marguerite Delatte, who bore him several more offspring.

From 1770 until his death in 1803 Jean-Baptiste was a prominent planter on the German Coast, cultivating with slaves a sizable farm of 9 x 40 arpents (about 305 acres) along the river near present Edgard.

His five sons were also successful farmers in the same area,5 and probably many of the Rodrigue families that now live in St. John the Baptist and St.

James parishes are their descendants. Most of the latter, however, by the time of World War I may have moved into the New Orleans area where today 150 Rodrigue families (25 percent of the state's total) make their homes.

During the 1820s and 1830s some of the male children of at least three of Jean-Baptiste's sons (Louis, JeanCharles, and Gabriel) began to migrate from the Mississippi River to Bayou Lafourche, settling in the vicinity of Thibodeauxville.

In the 1850s several Rodrigue families moved down Bayou Lafourche as far as Raceland and Lockport, and by 1870 one had reached the vicinity of Larose.

Others spread southward down Bayou Terrebonne, settling near Houma and Montegut after the Civil War.

Another larger contingent occupied the narrow natural levees along Bayous Chacbay and Choctaw north of Thibodeauxville, where they and their neighbors raised truck crops for the New Orleans market. Today about 60 Rodrigue families live in the small community of Chacbay alone, and the parishes of Lafourche and Terrebonne contain 40 percent of the total number of Rodrigue households in the state.

Today few members of the Rodrigue clan are found outside the areas mentioned above. Those who live in New Iberia and other points along the lower Bayou Teche can probably trace ancestry from some families that migrated from Terrebonne Parish in the late 1860s. An example is the family of Jean-Adolphe Rodrigue (great-grandson of Jean-Baptiste) and wife Marie-Donatile Naquin, who left Terrebonne Parish after the Civil War to settle near New Iberia