Research Guide

From Louisiana to Acadia to France: The Three Crossings

By François · Racines Genealogy · Published September 3, 2026

A Cajun family tree is usually well built at the bottom. The Louisiana records are good, the community has worked them for decades, and if your people are Broussards or Landrys or Thibodeaux you may already have them back through the parish registers of the Attakapas country to an arrival, and from the arrival back into Acadia. Some readers of this article have a documented line to Port-Royal and a photograph of the plaque.

Then comes the third crossing, and the ground gives way. Acadia back to France is a different kind of problem from the two before it, and this article exists mainly to explain why, because the reason is more interesting and more useful than the usual answer.

Three crossings, then, taken in the order you actually work them: backwards.

The first crossing: Louisiana back to the exile

The Acadians who reached Louisiana were not deported there. They arrived in stages over roughly twenty years, from the British colonies and from France, by their own effort and with Spanish encouragement. The historian Shane K. Bernard, writing for 64 Parishes, the encyclopedia of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, puts the total at about three thousand Acadian exiles who eventually made their way to Louisiana, arriving from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and France among other places.

The largest single movement came last. In 1785, seven merchant vessels carried Acadians who had been stranded in France to New Orleans; the Acadian Memorial's compilation of those arrivals counts 1,596 passengers across the seven ships. If your family came in that year, this crossing is the easiest of the three, because it can be pinned to a named vessel and a date.

Where it breaks is on names. A family that passed through an English colony, then a French port, then a Spanish administration comes out the other side spelled three different ways, and the same given names repeat in every generation. The join is made on family structure, ages and sibling groups, not on spelling.

The second crossing: the exile back to Acadia

This is the crossing that the Grand Dérangement scrambled. Between 1755 and the early 1760s, families were removed from Nova Scotia and Île Saint-Jean and scattered from Massachusetts to Georgia, to England and to France; the totals are disputed and the reasons they are disputed are worth knowing, so the deportation has its own article.

For this crossing the practical point is that the exile years are documented, just not in one place. Exiled families were administered: listed on transports, supported by colonial towns, baptised and buried in French parishes, and required to petition for what they needed. British embarkation returns, colonial provincial records, French parish registers and Spanish colonial lists all name Acadians during the dispersal. What no database does is join them.

Where it breaks is in the gaps between jurisdictions. A family can vanish for eight years between a Massachusetts town record and a French parish register, and the only thing that carries you across the gap is the family itself: the same children, the right ages apart, reappearing together.

The third crossing: Acadia back to France

Here is where almost everyone stops, and here is the part that is usually explained badly.

The founding population was very small. On the account published by the Aménagement linguistique dans le monde site, hosted by the CEFAN at Université Laval, “au total, 89 familles seraient les premiers ancêtres de quelque 300 000 Acadiens”: eighty-nine families are the first ancestors of some three hundred thousand Acadians. The same page notes that twenty-four different French provinces are represented by at least one colonist, while the centre-west, Poitou and Touraine, accounts for at least half of the first colonists.

So far this matches what you will read everywhere: Poitou, Aunis, Saintonge, and above all the Loudunais, the little group of villages around Loudun in what is now the Vienne. La Chaussée, Martaizé, Aulnay, Angliers, Oiron. There is a commemorative plaque. There is a museum farm. It is a beautiful story and it may well be substantially true.

It is also, as documentary evidence, much thinner than its confidence suggests. The same university page states plainly that “il n’existe aucune preuve dans les archives françaises attestant l’origine des familles acadiennes dans le Loudunais”: there is no proof in the French archives establishing the origin of the Acadian families in the Loudunais. Of the linguist Geneviève Massignon, whose 1962 study is the source of the Loudunais thesis, it says that her data “relèvent de simples hypothèses, non de faits documentés”, are simple hypotheses rather than documented facts, and that her hypothesis “ne repose que sur des similarités”, rests only on similarities. It allows that perhaps a score of families may come from the Loudunais itself. And it concludes that the origin of most Acadian pioneers remains undetermined.

What a documented origin actually looks like

The crossing is not impossible. It is specific. What carries a family across the Atlantic in the records is one of three things, and none of them is a surname on its own.

• An embarkation or recruitment record. The Saint-Jehan, which left La Rochelle on 1 April 1636, is the first sailing that carried families rather than men alone, and the names aboard it are known. Where such a list exists, it is the strongest evidence there is, because it ties a person to a port, a date and a contract.
• A French act that matches a person, not a name. A baptism in a French parish becomes your ancestor when the parents' names, the age and the sibling group all agree with the Acadian record, and no rival candidate fits as well. One name and one plausible year is a hypothesis.
• A notarial act. Engagement contracts, marriage contracts and inventories were drawn up before a notary and deposited in the departmental archives. They name people, places and relationships in a way parish registers often do not.

Which departmental archive holds the register is decided by French administrative geography, and if that is unfamiliar, how France is organized explains which level of the pyramid keeps what. Most of those registers are online, free, as images: see the free French archives online.

Common questions

Were the Cajuns deported from Acadia straight to Louisiana?

No. Louisiana was reached later, in stages between the 1760s and 1785, from the British colonies and from France. The deportation sent Acadians to the Atlantic seaboard, to England and to France; the move to Louisiana came afterwards and was largely their own doing.

Did the Acadians come from Poitou?

In part. The centre-west of France accounts for at least half of the first colonists, and twenty-four provinces are represented by at least one. But the familiar attribution of Acadian families to the Loudunais specifically rests on a linguistic hypothesis rather than on French archival proof, and the origin of most Acadian pioneers is still undetermined.

Can my Acadian line be traced to a French village?

Some can and some cannot, and which is which is a question about your particular family rather than about Acadians in general. A line that runs back to a documented passenger or a notarial contract has a real chance. A line that ends at a name in a 1671 census may not, and honest research says so rather than choosing a village that fits.

Sources and figures. The Louisiana total is Shane K. Bernard's, in 64 Parishes, the encyclopedia of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. The count of 1,596 passengers on the seven ships of 1785 is the Acadian Memorial's compilation; that breakdown traces back to a single compilation rather than to independent sources, and is given here on that basis. The figures on the founding population and the quoted statements about the Loudunais and about Geneviève Massignon's thesis come from the page on Acadian origins published on Aménagement linguistique dans le monde (archived copy, 4 August 2025), hosted by the CEFAN at Université Laval; that page carries no named author, and it is a university-hosted reference site rather than peer-reviewed scholarship, so it is quoted here as what it is. The sailing of the Saint-Jehan from La Rochelle on 1 April 1636 is as described by acadian.org. I have not read Massignon's 1962 study myself and do not cite it for any figure here.

François is a French-born genealogist living in the United States. He traced his own family's history, and its old stone mill, back to the 1500s through the French archives, and now helps American and Canadian families do the same. Continue with Cajun and Acadian roots back to France · which French provinces the Acadians actually came from · where the deportation scattered the families, and which records follow them · how to find the French village your ancestor came from · how to find your French grandparents, if part of the family left France within living memory. To see the whole method applied to one real family, read one real family, traced from New Jersey to two Alsatian villages, then the full report, with every source cited.