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I sat down and counted out on my fingers to make sure I got it right and discovered I was one "Great" short. He was my "Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather."

There's been a lot of work done on Cajun and French ancestry here in Louisiana over the past twenty years or so and I was able to pick up his story one day by simply walking over to a table at a big public event that reunited numerous Cajun families here in Lafayette, Louisiana about five or six years ago. I knew he was my ancestor already, because he was a big name as a founder of several towns in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes and he was the kind of person a family would want to claim. I saw the name, and when I read the "tree" underneath him I noticed that his grandaughter, my Great-Great Grandmother, had nothing branching out from underneath her on their published "tree." They had her marriage listed correctly, so I simply pulled out the big family tree I was carrying on poster paper for my Grandmother's family and let them fill in the rest, making sure that they got the documentation notes to verify what I gave them.

That was when I found out that he had been with Jean Lafitte at the Barataria Bay site. That was about 50 to 60 miles from where my Grandmother grew up. I collected the information, xeroxing some key papers, and brought it all back to everyone in the family. They loved finding it out.