What is the meaning of my last name "DeNure"?

Question:

What is the meaning of my last name "DeNure"?

My husband & I are curious as to the origin/meaning of his last name, DeNure, is. Any information will be helpful. Thanks!

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: There's more than one ethnicity at play and more than one possibility. Up to you to figure out which one is your family:

Five people with that surname left Switzerland in 1854 and came to the US. I can't tell you specifically which kanton they came from, but from previous research I know that a large number left from the alpine regions of what is now Jura. They left at the same time and settled in the same areas as these five DeNures.

A little background: the mountain villages were communal living arrangements. Basically they lived off of the one asset that they had....lumber. The town would spend the warm months cutting the lumber and taking it down to the mills. Then once a year they would receive a check and every family split the proceeds equally. Come the middle 1800s and things were starting to change. Profits from the lumber sales were as lucrative as they had been in previous years. More and more villages got better methods of taking down lumber to the mills, so the wood was more plentiful. An interesting idea came to many of them. A family (but it had to be the ENTIRE family...including both parents and all children...even adult children) could petition the commune for passage to the US. They would file the petition in the late winter and the commune would vote on which family(ies) they would sponsor. If chosen, the family permanently gave up all rights to the lumber profits. The commune used the next year's share of lumber profits to purchase the passports, train fares, ship's passage and spending money to relocate.

As soon as the roads were passable they would head across the border to the town of Belmont in Franche-Comte (the "free country" in the most rugged part of the French Alps). There they would get their papers in order and a travel agent would book their train and ships. They would go to Le Havre, have their passports stamped at the Hotel de Maire (city hall), buy their cooking utensils (everyone did their own cooking on ship), coffee, dried meats, etc. They'd spend a night or two in Le Havre, then either on to Southampton or Ireland. That would be their last port and the last stamp they had to buy. Then it would be 30-45 days onboard the ship to America.

Once in New York, Boston or Philadelphia, they would find a temporary place to stay (usually pre-arranged by their agent in Belmont). From there they would usually board a US train and head towards Lake Ontario. There were towns already in place where Swiss (non-Anabaptist) immigrants would be sent to. They were given the option of traveling west along the lake to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana or Wisconsin or they could take a steamship from Buffalo to Detroit, Green Bay/Manitowac or Milwaukee.

If your ancestors were part of this group, as I suspect they are from the year of emigration and French-ness of the name, then the records you need aren't that difficult to get. They're all onfile at the Jura Archives and the archivists are quite fluent in English. You need a copy of the petition to forfeit the proceeds and emigrate at the expense of the commune. Then you'll get the name of the commune, all parents, their place of birth, etc. From there, the best records are the local parish records (and I've found the LDS have most on file).

The following link is to Lorelai Rockwell's excellent research. I understand she has collaborated with an historian in Switzerland and may have a list of many of the Swiss who emigrated with a contract for passage. You may try contacting her to see if she has any additional information on the DeNure name.

http://w3.jura.ch/movelier/emigration/am...

http://w3.jura.ch/movelier/emigration/am...

The next group was Norwegian and ended up in Wisconsin. I can't find passenger records on them to know when they appeared in the US, but it was pre-Civil war.

Then we have a contingent of French-Canadians. In their family, Denure is a variant of Denieur, Denio and Denoyan. There's a large concentration of the family near Boucherville PQ in the late 1700s, early 1800s. By 1820 there was a bad economy in Quebec and many of the French-Canadians started going back and forth across the border into the lumber fields of St Alban's Vermont. They would often have their babies in Vermont in the fall and a year or two later take them back to their hometowns to have the babies baptized. To search those lines you'll need to use the Loiselle Marriage Index back to the late 1800s and then pick up the trail with the PRDH.

There are also references to the family "Denure" being a variant of the DeNoyelles family that originated with John Denoyelles in 1753 when he settled in Orange Co NY. I haven't read the book (Birth of an American Family by Daniel deNoyelles) and haven't seen the link from DeNoyelles to Denure, but it is in many NYS libraries and you may be able to get a copy on Amazon. My guess is that since there are many baptismal records for this family in the Reformed Church, they were probably Dutch and part of the colony of New Amsterdam that moved north out of the NYC area and settled in a couple of pockets around Orange Co, Albany, and a bit of western Connecticut. But you'd have to find the research by Daniel deNoyelles to know for sure what he found.

The only way to know for sure which group your family belongs to is to do the research from your husband backwards. It's crossing into many ethnic groups and has many variants which tells me that there is no easy answer to your question.