Geneva Lake with the nearby town of Geneva, Illinois, the city was renamed "Lake Geneva"; later the lake was renamed "Geneva Lake". Lakeshore attractions include Big Foot Beach State Park, Lake Geneva Yacht Club, the George Williams College campus of Aurora University, and Yerkes Observatory. The observatory is owned by the University of Chicago, which has established a study group to plan a regional center for science education at the observatory. Public access to the lake is allowed as the result of a decision by early European settlers that "20 feet of land leading up to the shoreline should be public domain."
French name of the name, being associated with claims to a place, but this is not always the case. The name de Gaulle, for example, is not a traditional French name with a "particule", but a Flemish Dutch name that evolved from a form of "De Walle" meaning "the wall". A popular misconception is that the "particule" "De-" included in the name always indicates membership of the nobility, that is to say, an original separated "de" that was linked to the name during the French revolution as "De-". That is sometimes true. Almost all nobility titles are of the form [title] <nowiki>[</nowiki>particle