One who has visited a shrine, a pilgrim.

From the latin "ros maris" - rosemary. This plant is sweet and evergreen.

Ancient and popular surname found principally in Galicia, Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, Andalusia, Castile. Derived from latin "romaeus" meaning Rome, or coming from Rome. Also found as Roman and Romeu.

"Romero" is a synonym of "romeo" from the latin "romaneus" meaning one coming from Rome. This could refer to the pilgrims who went to Rome.

Aragonese name extended throughout the Peninsula.

(Spanish) One who has visited a shrine, a pilgrim.

The surname Romero was introduced into Louisiana in the late eighteenth century, when Spain was attempting to bolster the population of its newly acquired colony with its own people as well as with others of the Catholic faith. In 1779 six Romero families arrived in New Orleans with many other Spanish colonists; five came from the Canary Islands,1* and one from Málaga in southern Spain.

The former settled either along the Bayou Terre-aux-Boeufs in St. Bernard Parish or in Galveztown at the confluence of the Manchac and Amite rivers in Ascension Parish.

Little is known of the Canary Island, or "Isleño" Romeros.

In 1850 only one Romero family lived in Ascension Parish, another in East Baton Rouge, and three in Orleans Parish, the latter probably descendent from the original colonists of St. Bernard.

The few present-day Romeros of Baton Rouge and New Orleans may stem from those families.

It was a different story with the one Romero family from Málaga. In 1779, with other Malagueños and Isleños (59 persons in all),6 Miguel Romero, his wife, María de Grano, and three sons were sent to the Attakapas to found a town to be called New Iberia on Bayou Teche and to raise flax for the Spanish market.

Initial attempts at farming among the Spanish colonists failed, and most of them, including the Romeros, turned to raising cattle in the Attakapas Prairie between the Teche and the Vermilion River.

The Romeros and several of their compatriots, such as the Seguras and Villatoros (Viator), eventually made their homes southeast of Spanish Lake (then called "Lac du Tas," later, Lake Tasse), a few miles northwest of present New Iberia.

Apparently Miguel and his sons José, Juan, Antonio, and Bernard (the first three born in Spain, the latter in Attakapas), were the forebears of most of the present-day Romero families in Louisiana. Two of the sons married Spanish women, members of the original group of colonists, whereas the other two married into local French families, thus beginning an early conversion to French language and custom, a process common to most non-Gallic settlers in south Louisiana.

For 200 years most of the Romeros descendent from Miguel's family have remained in the general area where their ancestor first settled. Of the 26 Romero families recorded in the 1850 Federal Census for Louisiana, 21 lived in St. Martin Parish, most of them in the area around Coteau, seven miles northwest of New Iberia and several at Petite Anse in the vicinity of Avery Island. By 1870 a few families had moved westward into the Youngsville area south of Lafayette and even as far as Abbeville in Vermilion Parish, while others filtered southward along the Teche toward Franklin.

Around 1890 Fernand Romero, a fifth generation descendant of Miguel Romero with María de Grano of Málaga, moved with his family from the Youngsville area to near Jennings. There he became a pioneer rice farmer.

Later some of his children settled in Welsh, where one of his grandsons, Clarence E. Romero, born in 1920, became the town's mayor.

The western movement of the Romeros since 1900 as far as southeastern Texas typifies the migration pattern of many south Louisiana families of French or Spanish origin.

Nonetheless, today over half of the Romero clan still resides near the Teche, with more than 300 households in New Iberia alone