Poeppelman Ancestry Trip - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Poeppelman Ancestry

My wife’s mother was a Poeppelman from the Ft. Loramie area and recently a reunion was held on the original family farm west of town still owned by a family member. The farm is located across Fortman Road from our home farm. A photo of the reunion attendees is shown above pictured in front of the house and barn. I was surprised to learn that OSU great AJ Hawk is a Poeppelman descendent, although I’m not sure if he’s in the photo or not. Also, the nearby land where Arrowhead Golf Course is situated was originally part of the Poeppelman family farm.

Check out this video of an interview with two Poeppelman sisters pictured above, Mary with the sunglasses, and Hilda, my mother-in-law, who both grew up on the home farm. Their parents died at a very young age, so the eight children in the photo below were raised by an aunt Clarie referenced in the video.

Back in 1837, ancestors Heinrich and Catharina Poeppelman emigrated to midwestern Ohio using the original chest shown below to transport their personal goods from the village of Rushendorf in northern Germany. The trip and other family history is documented in this write-up.

After the family reunion, the group of Poeppelman descendants pictured below traveled to Germany in order to see their homeland firsthand and to meet extended family members living in the area. Eleven of the travelers are friends of ours, including Larry, the best man at our wedding and his wife Donna, pictured 2nd and 3rd from the right. We discovered after all these years thanks to this photo that Donna and my wife are distant cousins! And my first cousin Don is the tall guy in the back row. Like me and Larry, he’s also married to a Poeppelman descendant.

Here’s a photo of the Ohioans enjoying some beer in their ancestral home town. Prost!

A stone marks the entrance to Hof Poeppelman, the home farm of the family's ancestors.

The five German Poeppelman’s (and their dog) pictured below in front of the Ohio travelers still own and live on the home farm. An interesting tidbit about the family is the husband changed his last name to that of the wife (rather than the reverse as is custom in the US) since his wife was a descendant of the landowning family. That custom maintains family ownership of the land in perpetuity.

Many thanks to Diane Poeppelman O'Connor, who organized the reunion and trip, for so completely documenting the events on social media which for use in this blog. A number of the Ohio Poeppelman’s attended German Heritage Days in Ft. Loramie over this past weekend. Apparently they learned some German while traveling, as evidenced by this video of them singing.

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