This site is dedicated to the Ladniers of the world. I know you're out there and you're probably all related to me from somewhere back in Europe, be it France, or Switzerland, or Germany(?). Off and on over the years I've looked for Ladniers via the Internet, and I've found that we're fairly well spread out. I believe that the majority of the Ladniers can be found in North America, but I'm sure they're elsewhere. So, I invite any Ladniers who find this site to write me with some of your family background, and, if you know it, a place or origin for your family.

NEWS FLASH!!!

I've finally updated the site. And to think, it only took two years for me to get around to it. I added some new stories about me and hope to update some of the other family members' pages, too.

Family Background:

The Ladnier family history, as I know it, is a strange mix of folklore and fact. As best I can tell, the Ladniers came to America from France, or Canada, either in 1699 with the Canadian explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, or in the early 1700s. After exploring the available data on the Internet, it appears to me that everyone who can even remotely trace their ancestors to south Mississippi/Alabama has linked themselves to either Christian Ladnier (Ladner), the person Pass Christian is named after.

Originally I wrote that "Even actress Diane Ladd, nee Ladner, . . . tries to cash in on poor, old Christian" and had a link to her biography, which had a silly story about some ancestor of hers named "Pas Ladner" who, with his brother, walked from Canada to the Gulf Coast and founded the town. I contacted her Webmaster about the story and the story is no longer there. Instead, her birth name is now Ladnier and she's a cousin to Tennessee Williams. Life keeps getting better.

The earliest ancestor I can find dates back that to the early 1800s. He is a man named Jean Baptiste Ladnier, who lived in on Dauphine Island, or in the area of Bay St. Louis, or near Pascagoula and he married a woman named, Lamey, or Moran, or oh hell, nobody knows. There's also supposed to be an Indian princess, named Noatimah, somewhere in the mix, but it's tough to verify that story, and, again, everybody with a link to the area claims her as a grandmother. Between Christian and Noatimah, they're progeny must number in the hundreds of thousands.

My take on this is that there was more than one person with the surname of Ladnier, or Ladner, who settled on the gulf coast in the 1699-1710 timeframe. I feel confident that more than one of them named one of their sons Jean Baptiste out of respect for Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, the governor of the area. I'm sure that there were Indian women involved -You don't really believe a bunch of hot-blooded Frenchmen could remain chaste with half-naked women nearby?- but I can't be sure one of them is my ancestor. Suffice to say that it'll take a lot more time and detective work to discover the truth. Maybe one day I'll be able to find out what happened all those years ago.

Famous (or near famous) Ladniers:

Believe it or not, there are a few Ladniers who have achieved some sort of fame or stardom. Below are the one's I've found via the Net.