Today more than half (53 percent) of the Soileau households of Louisiana are found in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes, with a large concentration (ca. 250 families) in and around Ville Platte. This area was first settled by Soileau families during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the present distribution exemplifies the tendency of the Louisiana French to remain in a given locality generation after generation.

Undoubtedly, the progenitor of the Soileau families in the state today was Noël Soileau of Mézières (province of Champagne, northern France), who arrived in Louisiana in 1719 with his uncle, Gérard Pellerin, and others bound for employment in a concession at Natchez.* Having survived the Massacre of 1729, Noël was appointed quartermaster of the royal warehouse at Natchez Post after the fort had been restored.

In 1737 he married Marie-Josephe Richaume, who bore him three sons (Noël-Étienne, Auguste, and Jean-Baptiste) and five daughters, some of the children being born in St. Charles Parish, an erstwhile residence of the family.

Before his death in 1757 Noël and his family moved to Pointe Coupee, where he had property;4 after his widow remarried in 1765 (to Alexandre Mercantel) the Soileau children remained in Pointe Coupee under an appointed guardian and tutor.

On emancipation the three Soileau sons settled in the Opelousas District, Noël-Étienne (m. 1771 Angélique Fontenot) and Jean-Baptiste (m. ca. 1776 Marie-Jeanne de Vidrine) obtaining land in the Grande Prairie area north of Opelousas Post, whereas Auguste (who remained single) established himself in the Coteau area south of the post.

Likely most of the Soileaus who now reside in St. Landry and Evangeline parishes descend from either Noël-Étienne or Jean-Baptiste.

Commissioned a second lieutenant in the French army and an officer in the local militia, Noël-Étienne Soileau was the most noted of the three brothers. From 1788 to 1805 he served as commandant of Avoyelles Post, where he previously had obtained property and where some of his children were born,7 but he returned to his Grande Prairie home before his death in 1810.

He also began a male line of descent far larger than that of his brother Jean-Baptiste. By 1830 Noël-Étienne's five sons had given him a total of twenty-three grandsons, most of whom had married and started families before the Civil War, all residing in old St. Landry Parish.

In contrast, Jean-Baptiste sired only one son, and by 1860 his male descendants numbered only two grandsons and four great-grandsons.

Auguste, a bachelor, of course left no known descendants.

Engaged in small-scale farming and stock raising, most of Noël-Étienne's sons reared families in the Grande Prairie area. However, son Jean-Baptiste (m. 1803 Marie Guillory) settled in Prairie Mamou (probably along Bayou des Cannes south of the present town of Mamou) and there began a long line of descendants probably represented today by most of the Soileaus who live in Evangeline Parish and the adjacent Eunice area. Although most of the descendants of sons Louis, Étienne, Charles, and Henri remained in the Grande Prairie area of St. Landry, before the Civil War some had moved into the Ville Platte-Eunice area, adding to the Soileau contingent already there. Such was the case of a son of Étienne, Henri Soileau, who settled in the Ville Platte district soon after his marriage to cousin Adélaîde Soileau in 1839.

Apparently few Soileaus moved out of the family stronghold of old St. Landry until the beginning of the present century. After World War I , opportunities in the industrial centers of Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and southeastern Texas may have induced some families to depart their traditional St. Landry homeland