Today nearly two-thirds of the 570 Roussel households in Louisiana are found along the lower Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. James Parish, where their ancestors settled more than 200 years ago. Between 1718 and 1730, several individuals named Roussel-soldiers, prisoners, vagabonds-arrived in Louisiana,1* but records indicate that by 1731 perhaps only one, Jean Roussel, had settled with his family in the First German Coast (St. Charles Parish) above New Orleans.

Later, in 1763, a French soldier on half pay named Pierre-Denis Roussel was living with his family in St. John Parish,3 and in 1773 a Claude Roussel dit Bourguignon was recorded as a planter in St. Charles Parish.

Available records suggest that Pierre-Denis and Claude were the progenitors of most of the present-day Roussels in Louisiana; each man started a separate line of the clan.

In 1766 Pierre-Denis Roussel, his wife Catherine Breaux, and their four children occupied 8 arpents frontage on the west bank of the Mississippi, probably above present Edgard.

His wife eventually bore him five sons-Mathieu, Antoine, Christophe, Georges, and Pierre-all of whom became successful planters along the river during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Mathieu (m. 1779 Marie-Charlotte Haydel), Antoine, and Pierre (m. 1790 Catherine Weber)—and probably most of their descendants—appear to have remained in St. John Parish.

Sometime before 1807, however, Christophe (m. Perrine Haydel) and, by 1820, Georges (m. Charlotte-Adélaîde Haydel) had moved upriver to St. James Parish.

In the 1830s one of Christophe's sons, Maximilien Roussel, is said to have begun the cultivation of tobacco in the Grande Pointe area of St. James, using an "aboriginal" process of curing to produce the famous perique variety.

Since that time the production of perique has been largely in the hands of the Roussels of Grande Pointe and several of their neighbors, such as the St. Pierre, Louque, and Martin families.

During antebellum days the sons of Pierre-Denis who remained in St. John Parish became prominent sugar planters and as early as 1820 owned sizable slave gangs.

After the Civil War some of their descendants moved to St. James; for example, in 1889 Octave Roussel, great-grandson of progenitor Pierre-Denis, purchased the St.

Cecil Plantation (700 acres) near Welcome, below Donaldsonville.

The Roussels of St. Charles Parish descend mainly from Claude dit Bourguignon and his wife Marie Hoffman.

Among their children were two sons, Dominique and Pierre-Louis.

Dominique (m. Marie Hymel) remained in St. Charles to carry on the Roussel name there;14 during antebellum times one of his descendants owned the Trinity Plantation below Bonnet Carré Point on the west bank of the river. Pierre-Louis, however, migrated to Bayou Lafourche probably ca. 1810, settling in the vicinity of Thibodeauxville.

His descendants were in part instrumental in extending the Roussel name along the Lafourche southward as far as Raceland and Lockport by the end of the nineteenth century.

Today only a small number of Roussel households reside along Bayou Lafourche, but some 150 families now live in New Orleans, most of them migrants from the plantations and farms along the Mississippi; other New Orleanean Roussels may descend from early families of the city whose records are lost or as yet unavailable