We thought for a while that it was a title too, but seeing as how their sons who came over here (there were at least three) were a dairy farmer, a mill worker and a day laborer, we kind of doubt that now. The last name thing makes more sense looking at the evidence.
We always knew from the older members of the family that the name was spelled differently back in Switzerland, but we weren't sure how it was spelled (Rohman, Rohmann, Romann, etc.) until we started finding old census records where they (my branch at least) still spelled it "Romann". They dropped the second "n" some time before WWI, and it's been "Roman" ever since. My Great Aunt (the first daughter of the one who immigrated) couldn't remember for positive where he was from (but she was pretty sure it was Zurich, and it turns out she was right) but she always maintained that it should be spelled with two "N"s (even though she herself spelled it with one) and was sure we were German-Swiss (as opposed to French or Italian) since she remembered her parents and grandparents speaking German to each other when she was little and that her father had a thick German accent until he died in 1946. Her mother was a first-generation German-American, but she was killed in an accident in 1917 along with their youngest daughter, so any info she might have had on her side of the family was lost almost a century ago.
The most confusing part of researching the family is the names. The two brothers who immigrated that I know for sure their names were Henry (my Great-Great-Grandfather) and Adolph, but I forget the third ones given name. And its Henry on his immigration records and passenger manifest, and thats always how he spelled it in documents. How he could have the English spelling (as opposed to "Henri" or "Heinrich", which you would expect) while his brothers had "normal" German names is a total mystery.
