My last name is “Katzenmeyer”. I have been told that this means (or meant at one time) something like “cat merchant”. I have been told that the meaning is closer to “cat farmer”. Yet another answer was that it doesn’t appear to be anything like that at all.
So, what’s the Straight Dope on the meaning of my family name?
I’m not German, but I lived in Austria for 8 years. I’d say “cat merchant” is about as close as you can get. “Cat farmer” would be Katzenbauer, auf Deutsch.
That reminds me of a German clothing chain called Kleider Bauer, which translated literally means farmer clothes, or clothes of the farm. I can’t think of too many people here that would want to shop at a place called farmer clothes. 
Meier (meyer, etc) is something like a steward of something like an estate or farm-- farmer is sort of close but more like an, um. . . caretaker? Steward I guess is good. So cat-steward. Probably not as romantic as you were hoping.
What’s in a Name, by La Reina Rule and William K. Hammond supports capybara that meyer (meier, meijer, mayer, majer, maier, meir), indicates the bailiff or steward of a nobleman’s estate (at least when it is associated with a family having a coat of arms).
Katzen would be the plural of the German word for cat.
However, Rule and Hammond also point out two other meanings of the use of Katz as a name: it could be a modification of the Old German Cazo, meaning great speaker; it could be one of the variants, in German, taken from kohen-tzedek, the office of the priesthood in Judaism.
So the Katzenmeyer might mean “cat overseer” but it would seem more likely that it indicated either a steward for mmbers of a Jewish priestly family or that it indicated an ancestor who spoke for a nobleman.
(Cat herder, maybe?)
Cool. So my ancestors either spoke for a nobleman / Jewish priestly family or took care of cats.
Maybe they were stewards for Jewish noble cats? ;j
Thanks guys - this is why I love the Straight Dope. A quick and well informed answer in a very short time.
Cat merchant?! Yeah… that’s what some people call it. I think Huggy Bear may have used a phrase kinda, sorta like that a time or two. 
Seriously though, trying to do a literal word for word translation of a foreign language phrase can yield questionable results per the example below discussing the origin of the word “chagrin”.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. - chagrin
It might also mean that your ancestors were stewards or bailiffs at the Katz castle on the Rhine here in Germany.
Just a thought.
It could also be that this name has been given mockingly to your ancestor, in reference to some event in is life. Or perhaps he lived /was born in a farm/property whose name sounded like “Katz”. Or perhaps he had an uncommon number of cats.Or anything else. Names were given for all sorts of reason, as long as thay allowed to tell one person from another. It seems quite hopeless to me to try to figure out why a name as peculiar as yours could has been given to your ancestor.
Two irrelevant questions:
How can I get a job herding cats? It sounds like fun…
If “chat” is French for “cat” and “eau” is French for “water”, what’s in those French wine bottles with “chateau” on the label?
Spend a few months working in the toddler room of a daycare center and see if you still think that
Now that you have a pretty good series of answers, a slight language hijack.
A German female friend was in Italy and saw a cat across the street. Being a cat lover, she called to her friends, “Katze” and pointed in the direction of the cat.
I do not speak Italian, but apparantly the crude name for penis in Italian sounds an awful lot like the name for cat in German.
A situation ensued.
That said, I don’t suppose you had relatives in Italy…maybe there is some strange mixture of German/Italian going on that would open yet one more can of worms in determining the basis of your family name.
lmao
Same thing that’s in eau de toilette.