Family name origins & meanings
- French : topographic name for someone who lived on or near marshy ground, from a diminutive of fagne ‘quagmire’. This, rhyming with Daniel, is how the name Faneuil is pronounced.
- The wealthy merchant who donated Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace, Peter Faneuil (1700–43), was the son of one of three Huguenot brothers from La Rochelle who came to America by way of Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Admitted members of the MA colony in 1691, they were among the small number of French Huguenot refugees who were able to bring considerable property with them to North America.