The progenitor of probably all of Louisiana's Verret families arrived in the eighteenth century from Canada, where the surname is still common, especially in the city of Quebec and environs.* Numbering several hundred, today most of the Verret families of French Canada trace ancestry to Michel Verret, who arrived in Quebec from France a short time before 1669; there he married twice (1669 Marie Deschamps, 1683 Marie Galarneau).

Census records indicate that the earliest known member of the clan in Louisiana was Michel-Joseph Verret of Quebec (youngest son of Michel and his second wife), who in 1724 was living on a farm in Cannes Brulées (near present Kenner), only six years after the founding of New Orleans.

Michel-Joseph first married Marie-Anne Bailiff (Bailly) who gave him his eldest son, Nicolas (b. 1725), the best known member of the Verret family in eighteenth-century Louisiana.

In his succession papers dated 1747, Michel-Joseph was recorded as having married a second time, to Marie LaBranche (Zweig), leaving six sons ranging in age from five to fourteen.

According to census records, in 1769 three of those sons (Michel, François, and Jean-Baptiste) were living in St. James Parish, and in 1770 two others (André and Joseph) were settled in St. Charles Parish.

Although the blood line cannot be traced with any certainty, it is possible that many of the 100 Verret families now living in New Orleans descend from Michel-Joseph's sons from his second marriage.

Reared on his father's plantation at Cannes Brulées with his half-brothers, Nicolas Verret in 1749 married Marie Cantrelle, daughter of an early resident of New Orleans.

All of Nicolas' seven children, including five sons, were born in New Orleans, but in 1769 he moved his family to St. James Parish, where both he and his father-in-law, Jacques Cantrelle, had previously obtained land grants.

There Nicolas was prominent in military and political affairs of the parish, becoming commandant in the late 1770s.

During the 1780s and 1790s his five sons migrated from the Mississippi River to Bayou Lafourche or to Bayou Teche to become the forebears of most of the Verrets who now reside in south-central Louisiana.

Sons Nicolas, Jr., Augustin, and Jacques settled in the Lafourche area where they were officers of the local militia.

Sons and grandsons of those three eventually moved southward along the Lafourche, those of Nicolas, Jr., settling near Raceland by the 1850s, while those of Augustin and Jacques reached the area around Thibodeauxville before 1830 and continued to move into Terrebonne Parish along Bayou Terrebonne and Bayou du Large before and after the Civil War.

One of Jacques' sons, Adolphe Verret, became a prosperous antebellum sugar planter on Bayou Black west of Houma, in 1860 owning 79 slaves on his 600-acre Orange Grove plantation.

Philippe and Louis Verret, after spending some time in the Lafourche area, migrated farther westward to Bayou Teche, where by 1810 their families had settled along the lower part of the bayou between Jeanerette and Charenton.

For nearly 50 years the descendants of Philippe and Louis lived in that area, but after the Civil War some families began to move down-bayou to the vicinity of Morgan City.

Today more than 30 percent of the Verret families of Louisiana still live along the Teche between New Iberia and Morgan City, whereas 18 percent are found in the Lafourche-Terrebonne area.

In the 1880s some Verret families moved from the Teche into Vermilion Parish and by 1890 others had settled as rice farmers around Welsh and Lacassine in what was then the eastern part of Calcasieu Parish.

Subsequent years saw the movement of some Verrets, with other French-speaking families of south Louisiana, into southeastern Texas as farmers and industrial workers