[Diese Seite in Deutsch]
General information about the origin of the surnames
Blocher and Plocher and their spread
The earliest occurance of the surnames Blocher and Plocher has been traced in the area around the town 72172 Sulz by the Neckar river, Wuerttemberg. Nearly all early entries of the surname have been found in this area. Just two entries dated before 1750 have not been traced yet in this area: one branch of Blocher in the county "Siegkreis" (near Siegburg, North Rhine-Westphalia) and a wood-carver, coming to the Lorraine area, France with supposed origin in Tirol/Austria. In Wuerttemberg the linguistic root of names like Blocher - Plocher has several variations. You can find similar surnames like Blocherer or Blöchle. The names Blocher and Plocher came into being along the old linguistic border between Swabians and Alamans at the upper valley of the river Neckar. This is the eastern border of the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) area with its center in today’s counties (Landkreise) of Freudenstadt and Rottweil.
The spelling of name occured for the first time in a document from Heidelberg and shows the origin of the name in Holzhausen (today: 72172 Sulz-Holzhausen) in 1446. The spelling has not changed in German speaking countries since that time. There are two types of spelling: Blocher and Plocher. In some places like Empfingen you can find the spelling Blocher, in other places like Holzhausen only the spelling Plocher is used. In places like 72172 Mühlheim am Bach the spelling changed from on generation to the next. In all other German speaking countries as well as in the Netherlands, the synonymous surname and spelling is Blocker. In America the spelling changed partly from Plocher to Blocher and also from Blocher to Blocker, Blucher, Blotcher, Bloker, Bloucher and other forms.In German language pronunciation of ch like in Blocher is rather a special one and cannot be found in the English language. Ch in German sounds like mujer in Spanish.
About the meaning of names: About 1300 up to 1500 when surnames came into being in Germany, an older form of language (Mittelhochdeutsch) was in use. This old form changed its spelling and pronunciation several times till it became the modern German language of nowadays. The old German language was based on a variety of dialects. A general German language (Hochdeutsch) was first formed in the 19th century and had ist roots in one of those dialects. Because of all this transformations of the language the meaning and notions of old surnames are partly hard to explain.
So the meaning of the surnames Blocher and Plocher cannot yet be clearly defined. In the scope of my research I have found four interpretations:
1. In old days a person was punished or imprisoned in the "block"( "in den Block" - synonymous for "to imprison in jail") The warden of a local prison may therefore have chosen Blocker or Blocher as a surname. In the 19th century the Blochers from Gundelshausen referred to this in a signet, showing two crossed keys. 2. In the area of the name's origin wood processing is still quite important for the economy. The product, a block of wood (Holzblock = Block) may have served as a reason to chose the name as a surname for a person working with wood. In many German-speaking areas a person's name is formed by just adding the ending er to a word (Bloch - Blocher.
3. The surname Blocherer is possibly an indication that Blocher is a word of unknown meaning (with typical er-ending to form the surname Blocherer).
4. Another trace may be found in The Swiss-German Dictionary (Wörterbuch der deutschen Schweiz). There you can find Blocher as a synonym for Bohner. The South West of Germany always had a strong connection with Switzerland. 5. According to Fischer, Schwäbisches Wörterbuch (dictionary of the old wuerttembergian language) there had been some similar words in use.
plochen (means heavy breathing with a noise)
Blochwagen (called in 1433, means a heavy wagon)
6. The same source show us Blöcherbaum (called in 1608, means a strong and heavy tree for the use of carpenters. This meaning had been used in the rafting of wood from the area of the Black Forrest to far distant places like Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In former times rafting as a trade had been familiar in the Black Forrest. In Hessia you can find the surname Blöcher but not Blocher.
7. A source from the collection Dr. Rommel, archive of the city of Freudenstadt says that the surname might be the patronymic extension of Bloch / Ploch.
8. At last the surname could come from the name of a location. Several locations (villages, farms, leas) content Bloch (Block) and a man named Blocher could be a migrant from a place named Bloch. Source No. 7 offers a hint that Bloch had been a place On the other hand it is possible that a settler gave his surname to the location. This often took place in America where villages or farms named Blocher show a first settler of this surname.
Please notice that similar sounding surnames like Ploching, Blochinger ... are of different origin. Those surnames indicate teh descent from the city Plochingen am Neckar/Wuerttemberg (far away from the area of Sulz am Neckar).
Was there a single late ancestor for all?
It seems unlikely that there has been one ancestor for all the families Blocher and Plocher. Nearly every surname came in use in several places at the same time. We should consider that the development of surnames took place in a long time schedule of ab. 1300 to 1500.
How family branches spread: Studying in the old church records for the year 1650 you can find many entries of families named Blocher and Plocher in Holzhausen, Voehringen, Bergfelden, Muehlheim am Bach, Empfingen, Gundelshausen, Marschalkenzimmern and other places in the area around the town of Sulz am Neckar.
In the old wuerttembergian villages there are lists of the armed forces (Wehrregister) in the Hauptstaatsarchiv (main states archive) in Stuttgart and you can learn a lot about the spread of surnames pre 1600 - the Plocher / Blocher are mentioned in Holzhausen, Mühlheim am Bach and Vöhringen (consider that Wuerttemberg did not enclude all of the villages in the environment and had armed citizens only on its own territory).
From the said area the name spread through emigration and migration. The rise of population and hard economic conditions in the area of origin caused continuous migration. So families established themselves in places like Leidringen, in Switzerland and Austria. Since 1730 many people emigrated, mainly to America but also to Hungary, Poland and Russia (see emigrants list). Today more than half of the descendants live in America with their names having been transformed in some cases into Blocker, Blucher, Bloucher, Bloker, Plotcher and others. Map of the area of origin of the names Blocher and Plocher in Germany / Baden-Wuerttemberg:
