Allemanns of
Farnern, Canton Bern, Switzerland

Contributed by Mauricio Alemann
I am a descendant of Allemanns who are from Farnern in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. I have traced my ancestry back to 1515 where I found a Jakob Allemann living in Farnern, on the farm Schmidematt. From that point on I have compiled a complete list of my ancestors, my great grandfather emigrated to Argentina, and my self emigrated to New Zealand some 20 years ago.

I know that there are Allemann (or close to this spelling) families in Graubunden and the Bernese Oberland, but they all seem to start out much later than the ones I found in Farnern. There is also a family of von Alemann living in Germany, their ancestry goes back to Magdeburg in the 14th century, I have their e-mail address if anyone is interested.

Would be happy to hear from anyone who is interested.

According to the register by the Mormons, the Allemann from St Stephen in Bern go back to 1546, I have not further looked at this line as the records start later than the ones for Farnern where I am from.

There was a Jakob Allemann in the city of Bern who was accepted as citizen around 1470. He was from Chieri (near Torino in Italy) and he was the official pharmacist of the city of Bern. It's amazing how many Allemano, Alemani, etc are still in the phone book of Torino, that seems to be another branch which established themselves around that Italian town.

This Jakob had three sons: Nr 1 by name of Hans had only a daughter and the name was lost. Nr 2 by name of Niklaus had an illegitimate son who changed his name to Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, later on dropping the Deutsch, who was a famous artist during the Reformation in Bern around 1530. Nr 3 was a son by name of Wittung (Guidone in Italian) who around 1492 traveled to Chieri to sell some of the properties of his father to pay the death duty. From that point on I have lost track of him in spite of having researched three times the records in the archives of Bern and Solothurn. This Wittung could be the missing link to go further back from 1515 when I found the first Allemanns in Farnern, Bern, but I cannot find any more information.

If anyone out there can help me I would be very grateful.

There are of course other Alemans, I'm thinking of the Spanish spelling, they derive mostly from around Barcelona, possibly there is a connection with the visigoths who occupied that part of Spain. Some of these descendants have made it in the world, see ex-president of Mexico, and current president of some other Central American country.

Mauricio Alemann,
Mauricio@clear.net.nz

The URL http://RJHenry.com will always point to the current location of this website..