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Dear Bob,
My grandmother's name was Vernie Durant, and she was raised in an orphanage in Manchester, NH, so we didn't know much about her family. I have been researching it for the last several years and have hit some walls, but have learned in her case the family was completely French in origin. Came from Quebec via Vermont. The name in French is really Durand, but in the US was often spelled Durant, the English version.
To complicate matters further, the possibility in my family is that the name might originally have been "Morel DeLaDurantaye." This was a noble family originating on the French-Swiss border
in the 1400s, but they moved to France, forget where, in about the 1500s. The progenitor in North America from that family was Olivier Morel DeLaDurantaye, who came to New France in the early 1600s, and was important in that early colony, had large land holdings (now called Durantaye in Quebec) and was one of the founders of the fur trading post called Detroit! His descendants took name Morel, some of them, or Durantaye, with or without the De Las, and some became Durant in the US. In my family the name is pronounced with the accent on the FIRST sylabble, one of the clues that makes me think it was from the DeLaDurantye bunch.
Another thought: Maybe your ancestors came from Corsica, the island off of Italy that has passed back and forth between France and Italy for centuries. The people there, I have read, are a mix of French and Italian. This is where Napolean was from, by the way.
Sue Stevens
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