The Jehan Terriot family is an Acadian family. Most (if not all) North Americans with the surname or some variation of the surname are descendants of Jehan Terriot¹ and Perrine Brault². Jehan emigrated in 1632 from Martaizé in the ancient province of Poitou, France and sailed from La Rochelle, France⁷ to establish a settlement called La Hève in Acadia⁵. We will begin with an account of this sail next in The Sail from Le Havre to La Hève. (The ship's origin was Le Havre in Normandy, thus our play on words.)  Jehan was among the first settlers in 1632³ of La Hève, Acadia in the New World. Today, La Have⁴ with its anglicized name is a picturesque sea-coast port village west of Halifax in present-day Nova Scotia. The fishing village has a gem of a museum²³ on Fort Point (the original landing site in 1632) which focuses on this particular story and the Terriot's.

We will now go back to Martaizé in old France, our ancestral village, which is a small, sun-washed village south of Fontevraud in the Loire River valley. Fontevraud by the way, has its own interesting sites. It is the resting place of King Henry II and King Richard, the Lion-Hearted. We will tell you all about it in Tour of our Ancestral Homeland;  the story of our visit to Martaizé, La Rochelle and of the surrounding ancient province of Poitou.

With that, we're now ready to sail across the Atlantic to old Acadie, present-day Nova Scotia, for a tour of the old habitations and settlements. We'll take you on a photo tour of La Hève, Port Royal, Grand Pré, Beaubassin and the Baie Ste-Marie area where today many Acadians continue the Acadian story.

Before we shift our focus to the Terriot family tree, the section on Migration from Acadia  will take us through the journey of the Terriot's from Acadia to other parts of the continent and the world. Here, we will trace each generation as they eventually settle in their contemporary locations. At this point, we will be prepared to review the  branches of our  family (as we discover them) in our Great Family Branches section.

The Great Family Branches page will list and introduce each branch of the family. Our TERRIOT ACADIAN FAMILY^© websites are organized to allow each Great-Branch^© of the family to have its own website. A Great-Branch is defined by the ninth-generation person in your branch. In my case for example, Joseph, my great-grandfather is the ninth-generation grandson of Jehan in my branch. So, my Great-Branch is the Joseph/Théogénie branch (Théogénie was his wife). The members of the branch include all the direct descendants of Jehan through to Joseph, and all of Joseph's descendants, direct or otherwise.

This website, TERRIAU.ORG will serve as the portal website for the Terriot family and a link between the Great-Branch websites. Altogether, the sites will form a 'ring of websites', known in the Internet community as a 'web ring'.

I am prepared to help to the extent that I can, to advise and lend a hand to anyone who would like to sponsor and produce a Great-Branch website. But for those branches who do not have a separate website, we will try to cover some of the the news, photos and other topics here in this site. If your Great-Branch is fortunate enough to have a member who is willing and capable of sponsoring and producing a website, that branch will be so identified. If you are interested in the details of any of the Branch websites, the links to each website will be given in the Great-Branches section. Since we are just beginning in this new organization, we have already identified a few Great Branches but currently have just the one Branch website: the Joseph Theriault Great Branch.

As I continue my research (with your help) into the genealogy of our family, I will eventually uncover new information which will allow me to revise our archive and this website. However, in spite of this progress, I know that there will always be some Unsolved Mysteries. In the hopes that you may be able to help solve these mysteries, I devote an entire section to list these most mysterious questions.

I hope to hear from anyone (in either French or English) who has information about, or who is a descendant of Jehan Terriot.  To promote some interest in this, I have created a special  Photo of the Month section where I will post selected photos of members of the Terriot family that I hopefully will receive from you.

We recently opened a new section on "Acadian Cuisine" where we share some of the ancient Acadian recipes with you. We invite you to share yours with us in our search for the old recipes. Aside from food, the Acadians are well known for their music both the Acadian and French-Canadian variety as well as the Cajun variety down in old Louisiana. We are very proud of our growing collection of folk music in our "Acadian Music, La Bonne Chanson" section which we invite you to enjoy, download for your personal listening pleasure...

I also think that it would be interesting to carry the family news and so, we do that in the La Grande Jaseuse, our family gazette. Click over to that page and get updated on some of your relatives.

In the business of carrying out my investigations on genealogy, I exchange correspondence and e-mail with various archives, Acadian Centers, museums and websites. I will post those in our Letters, Notes and E-Mail section as well as any letters and e-mail that I may receive from you which would be of interest to the family in general. Postal address information for individuals and other sensitive infomation will not be published to protect your privacy.

If you would like to learn how to best use our website, click once on the Acadian flag at the end of this sentence and we'll take you to our Help page. 

You are welcome to browse through our Archive of Descendants, List of Surnames (which lists all of the other family names that are married into our family) and the Index of Names of all members of our family. Feel free to download any of the information you find interesting. And, be sure to let me know by e-mail if you have any problems. I've included a Using the Archive section which I hope you will find helpful. Also, to help those of you who (like many of us once upon a time) have no idea as to start researching your family genealogy, we have our "Researching your Genealogy" section which we think you will find helpful.

Finally, I am delighted to share my list of Useful Acadian Genealogy Websites with you. This list includes only those that I have found most useful for Acadian genealogy. You will find that very little (if anything) is sold at those websites. I have found them to be very helpful and easy to use.