Welcome to CaddoTrees.com-Caddo Parish Genealogy, if you're digging up roots in Louisiana around Caddo Parish this site may be helpful to you. I started out doing my own family tree and soon realized it was turning into a genealogy chart for many families. My father’s family has been living in Caddo Parish for over 170 years, black, white, and Native American all form this history. On ANCESTRY.COM I ran into a few other Caddo researchers who were distant cousins as the whole parish basically is, and we’ve all learned much from our combined years of research into our own family trees. Sooner or later if you’re doing genealogy in Caddo we all cross paths. My family story is common to most African Americans, slavery and the owners of the slaves. The purpose of this site is to document the first two generations off the plantations and further back when possible, along with any old photos I can dig up, stories and family history. This will include some lines on the slave owners as they connect to many of us who carry their blood. As we know when the slaves were freed many took the name of their owner, this could be from a blood relation or just the only name they had to go by. So not all the people in the area with the same last names are related. It can be very confusing and overwhelming at times so this list of family trees will be helpful as most of the information has come from direct family trees and will be pretty accurate. Of course not all records will be perfect as many families have complicated webs to figure out, many adoptions, affairs, and multiple reasons for a person’s record to be in-accurate especially with the first generation off the plantation. So where ever there is a question mark or alternative theory for a person I will list it, and if I’ve made a mistake on your family please let me know so I can correct it.

This rural area of NW Louisiana borders Texas and Arkansas and is known as the Ark-La-Tex area, and many of these families have roots in all three states. Not much has been documented on these rural communities and this site is an attempt to add to the few other sites that are documenting these families. The culture of Northern Louisiana is very different from the culture of Southern Louisiana, especially compared to New Orleans. Caddo Parish doesn’t have the French influence that Southern Louisiana does, most of the settlers in Caddo Parish were English, Irish, and German and had migrated from the Carolina’s, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama. Where my family grew up (Mira and Rodessa) you still see cotton fields driving up HWY 71, it’s hard to drive by these fields and not think about my grandparents and their parents out there picking cotton in that hot sun.

Much of my family history was handed down orally generation to generation and it’s a blessing to have had family historians before me preserving this precious family lore. My father wasn't much of an historian, he told me some things as a child which planted the seed that would grow later and whenever I would ask him something about the family history he always referred me to grandma, aunt Earnestine or uncle David. When I first got online doing my research I started out trying to confirm all this lore and was able to see that our history had been passed down very accurate. Just about everything I’d been told I found records for, and tons more that has surprised and pleased some of my family elders. Of course there are some stories that turned out to be false but they are very few and mostly minor in-accuracies, for example: someone thought to be a brother was a cousin, wrong birth dates & places, etc. Being able to verify family lore and put in the place of documented/verified history is a great thing for any family historian and I know this work will save much time for future Caddo family historians. Happy diggin.....

Site contributors for info & photos: George Allen, Dwight Tucker, Norida "Chickee" Lear/Nelson, Earl Monroe, Clara McCoy, Bernita Tyson-Gray, Pauleta Davies, and many other family trees on ancestry.com I've gathered much information also from redriversankofahs.org & afrigeneas.com