LaRue family

The LaRue Family

The Castleman and LaRue families in 1898, on the 90th birthday of Sarah LaRue Castleman, who is sitting in the center of the photograph in between two of her daughters. The celebration was held at the home built by Jacob LaRue near Hodgenville, Kentucky, in 1800.
Ethnicity	French
Current region	Virginia and Kentucky
Place of origin	United States
Connected families	Hodgen, Helm, Castleman
Estate	Claremont, Bloomfield, Villa LaRue

The LaRue family was a family of American pioneers, primarily in Virginia and Kentucky, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The name "" is French and was spelled in many different ways over the years. Today the most common form is "LaRue" or "Larue", but other forms include "Larew", "LeRoux" and "LaRoux", "LaRu", "Laro", "Laroe", "l'Rue" and "l'Roe", "de la Rue" and "de la Rew", "Lerue" and "Lerew", and sometimes as only one syllable, such as "Rue" or "Roux".

The LaRue family and its descendants trace their ancestry back to the French Huguenot Abraham LeRoux, who sailed to America with his family around 1680 as part of a mass exodus from France. According to LaRue descendant and author of Six Generations of LaRue and Allied Families, Otis M. Mather, several attempts to trace Abraham's family to a particular individual or locality in France have been unsuccessful. However, Don Holland Watson began the search in 1961 and, along with his two sisters, visited Germany and France on several occasions, tracing the family from the sub-province of Lalloeu in France to Mannheim, in Germany, and from there to the USA, then tracking the family until modern times, all across the USA in personal visits. The photograph shown here was duplicated with Don, his wife Margarete, and dozens of LaRue family descendants in 1998. The research is current as of 2015. All of it has been posted online, at Rootsweb and Ancestry.com, originally titled "LaRue and Allied Families." Although there are dozens of family traditions describing in various ways how Abraham and his family first arrived in America, all sources agree that some of the LaRues were murdered during or soon after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, and afterward scattered across Europe and, eventually, America, where several members of the family were reunited.

Abraham LeRoux (LaRue) settled in New Jersey, where he died in 1712, leaving behind a son named Peter. Peter had three sons of his own; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, from which sprang the LaRue families of Virginia and Kentucky. In 1743, Isaac LaRue purchased his first 250-acre parcel of farm land along a little stream known as Long Marsh Run in the Shenandoah Valley, in what is now part of Clarke County, Virginia. Future president George Washington, whose family lived nearby, surveyed the land for Isaac after the sale. Isaac built a log cabin to live in and, later, a two-story, coursed limestone house named Claremont, which was completed in 1778. His son Jacob settled nearby and in 1775 completed his home, Bloomfield. Another son named Jabez built his home, Villa LaRue, further to the east in the 1790s. The three houses have survived and are now part of the Long Marsh Run Rural Historic District, near Berryville, Virginia. Isaac acquired thousands of more acres of land over the years, partly with the help of a friend and neighbor named Squire Boone, who was the brother of Daniel Boone.