Eymann / Iman Family Research - where to start?

Dear family genealogists,

we all are now doing our family research using the internet, and there is a multitude of different options how to begin. In this post, I try to clarify where my material comes from, where I store it, how you can access it, and how I distinguish correct from guessed information.

First of all, more and more material becomes available. Not all of it is behind a paywall, regardless of whether Ancestry or MyHeritage want you to pay for that. However, if you are already a member, I curate one actual database at MyHeritage (at https://www.myheritage.de/site-family-tree-384883/eymann) and I do a snapshot of it from time to time, to store it at Ancestry (at https://www.ancestry.de/family-tree/tree/196799439). Both websites, however, are only accessible to you AFTER you have paid for a membership. If you want to get a quick and free look without being a member, I have a database snapshot also at a French website Geneanet, (https://gw.geneanet.org/teymann_w?lp=0).

You might consider it convenient, to have so many entry points. However, it is not easy to keep all the records in sync. So please be aware, that I actualize frequently on MyHeritage, and not so frequent at Ancestry or Geneanet. To add complexity, my records have first been digitized in the 1990s, and since then, other fellow family members integrated them in their trees. By digging deeper in the archives, I found inconsistencies and errors, and corrected them in my tree - this is still an ongoing task. Sometimes, those corrections did not make it to the many other family trees out there. So I advise you: please do not take my entries (or others) for granted just because they are stored in any family database. Try to check for official sources and archives: birth, marriage and death registers; immigrant records.

A good source for records is https://www.familysearch.org/en/. If you are looking for German records (or the correct name and geographics for a location), check with https://gedbas.genealogy.net/?lang=en. For French records, Geneanet (see above), and for US records, also Ancestry.