A former Vice President of the United States. An actress on one of Australia’s longest-running television dramas. A nineteenth-century scholar whose Ethiopic dictionary is still cited by biblical historians. A Major League Baseball first baseman from the 1870s. All four turn up, in one form or another, on Family Group Sheets in the DFA’s own database — alongside architects, artists, a brewer, and at least one shipwreck survivor. What they have in common, beyond the surname, is that someone in their family line took the time to write their story down.

A Sheet Note, Not a Ranking

Of the 200 Family Group Sheets now in the database, only 24 currently carry an entry in the “Notable Family Members” field. That is 12 percent — a documented sample, not a census. A group’s absence from this article says nothing about whether it produced anyone remarkable; it most likely means no one has yet sat down and added that section to the sheet. What follows is a tour through the 24 that have, grouped loosely by the kind of achievement they record.

The Group With Three Names

No single sheet in the database carries more well-known names than Group 2 (Conrad Dillmann of Knielingen, Germany). Its notable-members field lists John Edgar Stillman, an early settler of Orange City, Volusia County, Florida, and grandson of George Adam Stillman; the actor Bradford Dillman; and Richard “Dick” Cheney, a former Vice President of the United States.

Bradford Dillman is the most straightforward of the three to confirm: a Yale graduate and former Marine Corps officer, he shared the Best Actor award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival for Compulsion, later appeared in Escape from the Planet of the Apes and The Way We Were, and worked steadily on stage, film, and television until the mid-1990s.^[1] The Cheney entry is the real thing: DFA genealogical research has traced the line of descent from Conrad Dillmann down through the family’s Dickey branch to Marjorie Dickey, mother of Richard “Dick” Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States.^[2] It isn’t a connection the handful of public quick-reference Cheney genealogies most researchers check first will turn up — those typically stop at the Dickey surname without tracing it further back — but it is documented in the association’s own genealogical records.^[9] Cheney himself was invited to a past DFA conference but did not attend.

Scholars and a Schoolmaster

Group 3 (The Erich Dihlmann Group) traces to Elias Dillmann, a schoolmaster in Illingen, Germany, whose two sons both went on to some renown. Christian Heinrich Dillmann founded the Dillmann Gymnasium in Stuttgart, a school that still operates under his name. His brother, Christian Friedrich August Dillmann, born in 1823, became one of the nineteenth century’s leading Ethiopic scholars and Old Testament exegetes — a professor whose grammar and lexicon of the Ge’ez language remained standard references for generations of biblical and Near Eastern scholars after his death in 1894.^[3]

A quieter, sadder story comes from Group 85 (Netherlands): Christian Felling Deelman, born in South Africa, studied at Oxford and became a research lecturer at Christ Church College shortly after it received its Royal Charter, only to die suddenly of illness in 1964 at age 26. The following year, Oxford established the Christian Deelman Travel Fund in his memory — a scholarship that, per the family’s own sheet, still exists today.

Artists, Architects, and an Actress

Frederick Dielman (Group 22, New Windsor, Maryland Dielmans) arrived in the United States at age eight and trained as a painter in Munich before building a career that spanned easel painting, magazine illustration, mural work, and mosaic design. He co-founded the New York Etching Club and, in 1899, was elected president of the National Academy of Design — becoming the first foreign-born Academician to hold that post — a role he held until 1909, during which he oversaw the Academy’s merger with the Society of American Artists.^[4]

Frankfurt appears again here, separate from the town’s role in this series’ article on village-level origins: Group 118 (Johann Thomas Dielmann from Frankfurt am Main) documents two more artists, Johannes Christian Dielmann, a sculptor, and Jakob Furchtegott Dielmann, an illustrator and landscape painter, both working in the nineteenth century. In San Antonio, Texas, Group 23 (Dielmanns from Hellenhahn, Nassau, Germany) traces a family of architects and civic figures: J.C. Dielman and his sons Leo Maria Joseph Dielmann and William Vincent Dielmann designed buildings across the city and took part in Chamber of Commerce trade missions to Mexico in 1919 and 1920, while Henry B. Dielmann Sr. practiced law and earned his own entry in the Handbook of Texas.

The most recognizable living name on any sheet belongs to Group 25 (Wilhelm Dillmann of Australia, England and Schellenberg, Nassau, Germany): Sophie Dillman, an Australian actress who has appeared on Home and Away since 2017 and had a recurring role on NCIS: Sydney in 2023.^[5]

Business, Baseball, and the Rest

Herman “Dutch” Dehlman (Group 184, Johannes Hermann Dehlmann from New York and Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany) played first base professionally from 1872 to 1877, first for the Brooklyn Atlantics and then the St. Louis Brown Stockings, leading the league in putouts three times during an era when professional baseball itself was barely out of its infancy.^[6]

Business runs through several other sheets. Louis Milton Dillman (Group 7, Dillman/Dayga Family) served as president of the American Book Company, a major American textbook publisher. Adam Dillman (Group 190, Melchior Dielmann of Cincinnati) was a co-founder and early employee of the Christian Moerlein Brewing Company, a Cincinnati brewery that became one of the largest in the country before Prohibition and still operates under its original name today.^[7] Marvin Dillman founded what is now Dillman’s Bay Resort in Wisconsin (Group 18), and Karlo Dillmann currently runs Weingut Dillmann, a family winery in Geisenheim, Germany (Group 12) — a rare case of a notable-members entry describing someone still working today rather than a historical figure.

One entry is notable less for achievement than for the marriage it records: Hugh Dillman (Group 21, Heinrich Dillmann of Maryland), an actor in his own right, married Anna Thompson Dodge, widow of automaker Horace Dodge and, in her own time, one of the wealthiest women in the world.^[8] A handful of sheets record smaller, more human-scale distinctions: Johann Peter Dielmann (Group 19, Odenwald, Germany Dielmanns) survived an 1831 shipwreck; John C. Dillman (Group 1, Anthony Dillman of Dillenburg, Germany) was proprietor of the Hotel Belnap, per a nineteenth-century Pennsylvania biographical record; and brothers Gerardus Jacobus and Hayo Egbert Deelman (Group 73, Wessel Deelman of Groningen, Netherlands) are both credited on the family’s sheet with filing numerous international patents. Several of these smaller entries trace back to the same DFA Newsletter articles this series has drawn on before.^[9]

176 Sheets Still Blank

Twenty-four groups is not a large fraction of 200, and it almost certainly undercounts what is actually out there. A notable descendant only makes it onto a Family Group Sheet if someone researching that line happens to know about them, and happens to add them — which means the real number of documented achievers in this family’s history is bounded only by how many members read this article and go update their own sheet.

That is, as with earlier pieces in this series, as much an invitation as a finding. If your own family group already has a public-office holder, an athlete, an artist, or simply someone whose life is on record somewhere, the “Notable Family Members” field is sitting there waiting for it.

Sources

1. “Bradford Dillman.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_Dillman.
2. “Dick Cheney.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney.
3. “August Dillmann.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Dillmann.
4. “Frederick Dielman.” National Academicians, National Academy of Design. Accessed September 2026. nationalacademy.emuseum.com.
5. “Sophie Dillman.” IMDb. Accessed September 2026. imdb.com/name/nm9079287.
6. “Herman Dehlman.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Dehlman.
7. “Christian Moerlein Brewing Co.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Moerlein_Brewing_Co..
8. “Anna Thompson Dodge.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Thompson_Dodge; “Hugh Dillman.” Wikipedia. Accessed September 2026. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Dillman.
9. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Sheet Database, compiled 2026; internal database, Dillman Family Association, citing various issues of the Dillman Family Association Newsletter. Individual family group sheets are numbered and held by the DFA.

AI Disclosure: This article was researched and written with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. Family group data is drawn directly from the Dillman Family Association’s Family Group Sheet Database; biographical details on named individuals have been verified against the published sources cited above where independent verification was possible.