Common problems when researching the Eymann / Iman surname

When researching my family records, I often stumble over some errors or misinterpretations. Two common problems are in the family name, and in the national geographics over the centuries.

On the name

The original Swiss/German family name is "Eymann" (with a double n). This translates to "the man (Mann) from the meadow (Bernese Swiss German "Ey"). Family names came up in the middle ages, and the government tried to somehow label families with a unique name. The combination of Ey & mann seems to be unique enough that we can pinpoint the original heritage to being a farmer for a meadow between Oberdiessbach and Linden in the canton Berne, Switzerland.

For religious and economic reasons, members of that anabaptist family migrated to France and Germany, starting around 1650. They settled mostly in German-speaking countries, so the name stayed as it was; it is pronounced differently when spoken, though. 

This changed with the emigration to America. On arriving in the US, the name underwent 2 changes over time. First of all, the second "n" vanished. An English man is still a German mann, and so it was easier to write Eyman without losing meaning. In the next generation, however, Eyman sometimes changed to Iman. Both Ey (in German) and I (in English) are pronounced identically, so it might have been easier for the clerks to write the name in the records how they heard it. 

On the geographics

The oldest records we have are from the Swiss canton of Berne; the newest ones from today's Europe and the US. Inbetween, names and affiliations of locations changed. That means, that sometimes the same location is known by different names, depending on the date of the record. Some common examples:

The Eymann family settled after the original emigration from Switzerland in the 17th/18th century in the Alsace (today: France) and in the Palatinate (today: Germany). However, Germany was only united in 1871. Before that date, the Palatinate belonged to the Holy Roman Empire (until 1797), then to France (until 1815), and then to the Kingdom of Bavaria (until 1945). So this is, why you sometimes see the same Palatinate location data as being "in Germany" or "in Bavaria" -- the village did not change location! Similar problems arise with the Alsace, which changed ownership between France and Germany a few times during these centuries -- here we have the additional challenge that villages have both French and German names. In the US, we have sometimes reorganisations of counties in the same state, splitting of states (e.g. Virginia and West Virginia), and overall a multitude of villages and counties with the same name. So please double-check the entries, before including it in your tree!