Bordelon Family

I am a descendant of GABRIEL LAURENT BORDELON, a French immigrant merchant seaman who came directly into New Orleans, and his wife, ANNE FRANCOISE ROLAND, who also came directly to New Orleans from France. They ultimately met in the new settlement of New Orleans, married and the whole Bordelon story started. She lived on Chartres Street and he was working for the Indies Company whose building was right across the street also on Chartres Street. 

New Orleans at the time was a very new, undeveloped colony where trees had to be cleared to make land and property livable for its new inhabitants. It is hard to visualize this today with the way we know modern New Orleans. I walked down Chartres Street many times, near St Louis Cathedral, and never knew this was where it all started. 

If you are a Bordelon with roots in Louisiana, you came from these two pioneers, and we are all related and descendants of GABRIEL LAURENT BORDELON and ANNE FRANCOISE ROLAND. 

Beyond New Orleans, I have strong roots in Point Coupee and Avoyelles Parish, where predominantly French Immigrants and their descendants settled. These settlements were built long before the Acadians came to Louisiana. The Avoyelles French settled first in Pt. Coupee and New Orleans then made their way to Avoyelles by 1781. Names such as Bordelon, DeCuir, Laborde, and Normand are unique to the Greater Avoyelles area. The first families were from France, either directly or by Quebec, except the DeCuir family from Macon, Hainaut, Belgium, and the Scallan family from Ireland. Only two early families who came to Avoyelles, Jeansonne and Moulard, have ties to Acadia, with Jeansonne being an Acadian version of Johnson, a Scottish name.

The Bordelon name is very common in Louisiana today, and Bordelons can be found all over the country. Everything from a U.S. Naval Ship (USS Bordelon) to a Medal of Honor recipient can be traced to the Bordelon name. The name Bordelon is of course a French name derived from Old French bordel ‘hut smallholding small farm’ a derivative of Borde . Ironically, this surname is now very rare in France. 

The history of the Bordelon family has been written in several books over the past several years, but like most amateur genealogists, I was explicitly interested in my branch of the huge Bordelon tree. I started this research many years ago in college but kept hitting brick walls. With the help of computer-generated census data, church, death records, and countless interviews, I have solved the mystery that has plagued me for years.

Interestingly, a few of my ancestors owned slaves; one was a Revolutionary War Patriot, and a few close cousins fought in the Civil war. Some were rich and held government offices, but most were poor.

Most married more than once, and I even have an ancestry grandmother who was kicked out of France and forced to move to New Orleans because of her " lawless and criminal behavior in France." Her story is most interesting!

I was amazed at how much inaccurate information is out there. People make plenty of assumptions and then post them on the internet, which proves inaccurate. Also, the census data, which was very valuable in most cases, often had wrong birthday information. Ancestry.com has great information but does contain half-accurate information from anyone who wants to post. I posted my tree on Ancestry.com, but beware because there is a lot of inaccurate information about my family on other trees. 

My facts are backed by proven documentation as much as possible, and little or no “assumptions" were made.  I can now connect all the branches of my tree and trace my ancestry back to Le Havre, France (1690s).