Roy Ancestors in Lousiana

Roys settled early in Acadia, and a descendant of Jean Roy dit La Liberté of St.-Malo was among the earliest Acadians to find refuge in Louisiana. Widower Abraham Roy and two of his children came to Louisiana in February 1765 with the Broussard party from Halifax via Cap-Français, French St.-Domingue. They followed the Broussards to the Bayou Teche valley, but they did not remain there. By early 1766, they had moved to Cabanocé/St.-Jacques on the river above New Orleans probably to escape an epidemic along the Teche that killed dozens of their fellow Acadians. Abraham remarried to a fellow Acadian, a widow, at Cabanocé soon after he got there, and his new wife gave him another son. His two sons settled at St.-Jacques and had sons of their own. Beginning in the 1810s, Abraham Roy's three grandsons and two of his great-grandsons abandoned the river and "returned" to the western prairies, where they settled in St. Martin and Lafayette parishes. By the 1840s, no Acadian Roys remained on the river. Roys from France and Canada lived in Louisiana from the earliest days of the colony. A French Canadian widower who had lived at Detroit and Kaskaskia, Illinois, settled at Pointe Coupée in the 1740s, but his sons by his second wife did not remain there. In the 1780s, they crossed the Atchafalaya Basin to the Opelousas prairies, where their lines proliferated. Most of them remained in what became St. Landry Parish, but some of them moved down into the old Attakapas District, complicating the family's genealogical picture there. By the late antebellum period, these French Canadian Roys greatly outnumbered their Acadian namesakes on the western prairies. Other, smaller Roy families settled in the western parishes. Meanwhile, another French Canadian family, no relation to the Roys of St. Landry and St. Martin, moved from Pointe Coupée to the Avoyelles prairie in the 1790s and created a new center of family settlement there. During the antebellum period, dozens of Roys, called Foreign French in Louisiana, came to New Orleans from France and the Caribbean Basin; most of them probably remained in the city. No Roy family appeared in the Bayou Lafourche valley until late in the antebellum period; they probably were not Acadian. Judging by the number of slaves they owned during the late antebellum period, some Roys, both Acadians and non-Acadians, lived well on their plantations and farms on the western prairies. By the time of his death in late 1847, Acadian Charles Roy amassed a holding of two dozen slaves on his Lafayette Parish plantation. His eldest son Désiré must have inherited most of his people; Désiré held only three slaves on his Lafayette Parish farm in 1850, but a decade later he owned 36. Some of their French-Canadian namesakes in nearby St. Landry and St. Martin parishes did almost as well. Noël Roy's widow held 30 slaves on her plantation in St. Landry Parish in 1860. Her husband's cousin Pierre Ulgère Roy, who was her neighbor, owned 14 slaves. Cousin Alexandre Roy held 13 slaves on his farm in St. Martin Parish. In Avoyelles Parish, French Canadian François Roy owned 14 slaves in 1850 and 19 a decade later. His cousin Villeneuve Roy, also of Avoyelles, held 15 slaves in 1860. The largest slaveholder with the name, however, lived nowhere near his prairie namesakes. Frédéric Roy, a native of France, held 44 slaves on his St. Bernard Parish plantation in 1850; a decade later, he owned 50 slaves--enough to qualify him as a "large planter." But most Roys, like most Southerners, did not own slaves and participated only peripherally in the South's antebellum plantation economy. Dozens of Roys, both Acadian and non-Acadian, served Louisiana in uniform during the War of 1861. ... The family's name also is spelled Leroy, Le Roy, Roi, Roye.