Zimmermann
also Zimmerman
The timber-man — the trade that framed the New World.
- Origin
- German
- Register
- German family
The seat of Zimmermann
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Zimmermann community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Zimmermann has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Zimmermann clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Zimmermann clan →What does the Zimmermann name mean?
The carpenter — literally the 'timber-man', Middle High German zimber (timber) plus mann. Exact cognate of English Carpenter.
The history of Zimmermann
Where the mason worked stone, the Zimmermann worked wood — and in a German countryside of timber-framed houses and great barns, his was the trade that literally held the roof up. It demanded geometry, a true eye and a chest of edge-tools, and it ran in families across the German lands.
In the forested New World, timber was everything, and the German carpenter's skill was decisive. The Pennsylvania-German barn — the huge stone-and-timber bank barn with its overshooting forebay — is one of the signatures the trade left on the American landscape, and German framers and joiners raised the houses, barns and churches of settlement after settlement. The name usually crossed as Zimmerman, a final n shed at the dock, the carpenter himself intact.
Explore With Your Ancestors · Beta
Pick any year from 500 to 1945 and any place on earth — the Zimmermann country, or a shore no Zimmermann ever reached. The chronicler sets the scene; the deeds are yours.