Family name origins & meanings
- Dutch : Latinized form of Polheim, a habitational name from a place in southern Germany or Switzerland.
- Johann Theodore Polheim, otherwise known as Johannes Theodorus Polhemus, was a 17th-century Lutheran minister, probably of German-Swiss origin. His earliest pastorates were probably in the Palatinate. In the early 1630s he was pastor at Meppel in the province of Overijssel, Netherlands, then from 1637 to 1654 he was a pastor in the Dutch settlement in Brazil. When that settlement failed in 1656, he came to Amersfoort, New Netherland, as its first Dominie.