Württemberg to Waterloo to New York.
A German family from the Heilbronn countryside that settled among Waterloo's Mennonites in the 1840s, and the branch that carried the name down to Robert's own mother.
The name
Fellman is the Americanized form of German and Swiss German Fellmann. The Dictionary of American Family Names reads it as occupational: Middle High German vel ("hide, pelt") + mann ("man") — a furrier or hide-dealer. The same formation is used as an Ashkenazi Jewish surname, and Fellmann is also found in Alsace. A place called Fell near Trier can explain related names like Feller; it is a weaker fit for the -mann form. The English/Norse fell ("hill, high ground") belongs to a different name and does not explain German Fellmann.
This documented branch is neither Alsatian nor Jewish. It is a Christian German family from Ödheim in the Heilbronn country — historically Württemberg, not Baden — with a grandmother, Elisabetha Zeisert, from the nearby estate of Willenbach, which had a Mennonite congregation around 1780–1810.
The line
Unlike some of the deeper, murkier branches of this family tree, the Fellman surname line has a specific, dated crossing: Samuel Fellmann, a miller born in Württemberg, married Christina Bachman of Baden on 17 October 1847 in Waterloo Township. The minister was Bishop Benjamin Eby — Mennonite bishop there from 1812, and the man the settlement was first called Ebytown for. By 1847 the village had already been renamed Berlin (Kitchener after 1916). The 1851/52 census lists the household as Mennonite. Samuel was later buried at Sandhills Baptist Cemetery (d. 12 Sep 1863); a son appears in the 1881 census as Methodist. They landed in that German-speaking Mennonite world and did not all stay in that church.
The generation-by-generation research, including the children who stayed in Waterloo and the Rochester branch, is at ancestry.fellman.us/families/fellman-surname/.
Ancestry's DNA Origins Journeys independently line up with the move: a "Southern Ontario, Northern New York & Northern Pennsylvania Settlers" cluster matches the Waterloo landing and the later New York branch.
The record
The documented direct line, generation by generation, down to Robert's own mother:
The documented research
The Fellman side carries most of the deep research on this family: the Ödheim → Waterloo → Rochester surname line, the Barrett/Barnes/Bartle frontier family it married into, a documented Mayflower connection through Howland and Angell, the Irish Dowling/Curry/Kelly family, colonial Connecticut and Rhode Island founders, and the myths an automated hint-tree quietly invented along the way — all sourced, all with confidence ratings.
The registry
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