Well, the spelling is thanks to the immigration officials when my parents came to the US. I believe that they transposed the letter in our last name using a cross-reference chart between cyrillic and english. If you were to do it phonetically, then it would be spelled Evanue. But how did anyone get Iwanow out of Iwanova?? I know that government officials aren't the quickest, but that had to be a stretch. What did they do? Just drop the 'a' at the end??
As for being related, who knows? People do make changes to their last names. Iwanova could have been something an ancester of yours could have changed to in order to better fit into the Russian/Slavic society, like many Slavic did when they came to the US (dropping the SKI from the end of their names) which would cause a genealogist a real headache. But if your interested in viewing my family research data, we have it available on our genealogy web site at
http://iwaniw.gq.nu/t_genpge.htmlTerry