Today Thibodeaux is among the more common surnames of French origin in Louisiana (nearly 3,000 households).

The name is not uncommon in French Canada, where it occurs especially in and around Montreal and in the Maritime Provinces; it is also frequent in New England, chiefly in Maine and New Hampshire, reflecting immigration from French Canada.* In both Louisiana and Canada the name may stem principally from Thibodeaux families who settled in Acadia in the seventeenth century.

The progenitor is thought to have come from the area of Loudun, province of Poitou, west-central France, the place of origin of many Acadian surnames that occur in Louisiana.

The first Thibodeauxs to arrive in Louisiana were some 15 Acadian refugee families of that name who came between 1765 and 1785.

Some settled permanently or temporarily along the Acadian Coast of the Mississippi River, while others went to the Attakapas country, the Opelousas area, and to the Lafourche.

The 1766 census of Louisiana listed eight Thibodeaux families in the Attakapas: four in the "La Pointe" district on the Teche, three in the section of "La Manque" within the prairies near the Opelousas boundary, and one along Bayou Tortue, west of Attakapas Post.

Among the Thibodeauxs in "La Manque" was Olivier Thibaudau and his wife Madeleine Broussard, who in 1765 gave birth to daughter Marguerite-Anne; according to Fortier, she was probably the first child born in Louisiana of Acadian parents.

Olivier Thibaudau was among the eight Acadian chiefs to sign a livestock contract with Captain Antoine Dautrive of New Orleans, who wished to encourage the cattle industry in the Louisiana prairies.

By the 1790s several Thibodeaux farmer-stockmen of the Attakapas were living along the upper Vermilion River in the vicinity of present Lafayette.

Another early Acadian arrival, Pierre Thibodaut and his wife Françoise Saunier, settled near Opelousas Post, where they became the forebears of a large line of Thibodeaux families of St. Landry Parish. Like many Acadian pioneers who settled the eastern edge of the southwestern prairies of Louisiana, Pierre engaged in stock raising, in 1777 grazing 80 cattle on his property west of Opelousas Post.

Of the five Thibodeaux Acadian families that arrived from France in 1785, four settled along the upper Bayou Lafourche, and one (Charles, his wife Madeleine Henry, and five grown children) went to Bayou des Écores (Thompsons Creek) north of Baton Rouge.

The four families along the Lafourche were responsible for the greater portion of the Thibodeauxs who lived in that area and later settled farther south along the bayou and into Terrebonne Parish. The one family at Bayou des Écores was probably progenitor of many of the Thibodeaux families in the Baton Rouge area.

Perhaps the most renowned of the clan in the Lafourche area was Henry Schuyler Thibodaux, who was not an Acadian refugee, but was born in Albany, N.Y., in 1769 of French-Canadian parents.

Orphaned early, he was reared in the home of General Philip Schuyler of New York and later was educated in Scotland.

In about 1793 he came to Louisiana, settling for a time in St. James Parish, where he married Félicité Bonvillain, to whom two sons, Léandre and Aubin, were born.

After his second marriage in 1800 to Brigitte Belanger (who bore him three sons, Henri-Michel, Bannon-Goforth, and Henri-Claibome), Henry S. and his family removed to the Lafourche. There he obtained property near the present city that bears his name. Ten years later he began his Sainte Brigitte sugar plantation five miles south of Thibodeauxville, a property that eventually comprised 1,720 acres on both sides of the upper Bayou Terrebonne; by 1860 it was worked by 177 slaves under the supervision of his sons.

Henry S. Thibodaux loomed large in local and state politics, becoming president of the state senate and, for a brief period in 1824, provisional governor of the state. His sons and grandsons also were prominent Louisiana citizens.

Several other members of the Thibodeaux clan in both the Lafourche-Terrebonne and the Teche areas became well-to-do antebellum sugar planters, but most were ruined by the aftermath of the Civil War. However, the greater part of the Thibodeaux families, like most of their French-speaking neighbors, were probably small farmers, who gradually settled along the bayous of south-central Louisiana. After the Civil War one of the more prosperous farmers of the Lafourche, Henry Melance Thibodeaux, a descendant of one of the Acadian pioneers, in 1878 moved with his wife and children to Bayou Boeuf, near present Amelia and Morgan City, where he established a thriving sugar plantation called Hardtimes. At his death in 1912 Henry M. Thibodeaux's property included 2,500 acres, comprising both the Hardtimes and Viola plantations, managed by his son, Clay F. Thibodeaux.

Thibodeaux families are found today throughout French Louisiana. Nonetheless the distribution reflects a concentration in areas first settled by pioneer families in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some 30 percent of all Thibodeaux households in the state are concentrated in St. Martin, Lafayette, and St. Landry parishes, the core of the colonial Attakapas and Opelousas districts. Another 17 percent are found in Assumption, Lafourche, and Terrebonne parishes. A century ago the U.S. 1880 census indicated more than 70 percent of the Thibodeaux households of the state lived in the parishes mentioned above. The past 100 years has seen a partial dispersal of the Thibodeauxs from the core areas into the rice- and petroleum-producing sections of southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas and to New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston