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Like I said, it's a theory, maybe a bit long, and I know that some of you may prefer more cold, hard facts and less speculation, but here goes:
Many possible spellings of Penrod have shown up in various records. A posting on this forum discussing Dorothy Turner's book THE PENROD FAMILY, as well as online records of German Palatinate history in New York serve as my sources for the name POENRADT. Since we know the name is German, let's start with that language.
So how do we get from POENRADT to PENROD? And why do I think that POENRADT is the "original" spelling? Well, mainly because it seems to be the only version that is composed of two German words. We have POEN and RADT. I don't want to bog anyone down with dull linguistics, but I might have to.
P-O-E-N is not pronounced "POH-en" but rather it is one syllable. "OE" is another way to write the German letter "O" that has the two dots over it (called an umlaut). It has it's own unique sound that is one syllable. It sounds like trying to pronounce the two English words "pen" and "pun" in the same breath. According to the LEO German-English Dictionary online (http://dict.leo.org/?lang=de) the German word "Poenale" means "penalty." Furthermore, it is restricted to the field of law, specifically contract law, and that outside of contract law, the dictionary deems its use as archaic. Archaic is a good thing, since when people began acquiring last names centuries ago, they chose from the words and spellings they had then. The root of that German word is, of course, "POEN" and does not show up in any other modern word formation to that dictionary's knowledge. (If you really want to get into language, look up the origin of the word "penalty" in an English dictionary. The letters "PEN" and "POEN" seem related in other ways, especially if German borrowed it from the same source as English, in this case going back to medieval Latin. I should note that German and English are related languages.)
R-A-D-T is pronounced similar to the English word "Rot" and it means "advice" or "advisor, counselor, councilman." The modern German spelling is "RAT." (It has nothing to do with the rodent!) Variations of "RAT" include RATH and ROTH among others, and many modern German last names end with those spellings. R-A-D-T, however, seems rare, and could be considered an archaic spelling of "RAT" since RAT and RADT are pronounced the same. And it makes sense that both words, POEN and RADT, would be archaic.
BONRATH, BONROTH, PENRATH, have been listed as possible interpretations of the original spelling of PENROD, but if John Penrod, the son of Johannes, was to spell his last name to preserve pronunciation, albeit lost a bit on the English tongue, then it stands to reason that PENROD is the best phonic interpretation, and the word POENRADT (sounds like "PEN-rohdt") most closely matches that. Plus, in Germanic script, capital letters "B" and "P" look nearly identical to a non-German, but I doubt that John Penrod would have been too easily confused.
So the meaning? "Penalty advisor." Of course, anyone remotely advising anyone in German seems to be dubbed "advisor," so quite possibly our ancestors were advising people on lawful matters - as a lawyer, perhaps, maybe dealing with contractual law or, in an archaic sense, the penalty for any infraction. I should note that the modern German words for lawyer and variations thereof are completely different, some of which sound like modern English derivatives. If German replaced their older words with newer ones, that would make sense, of course. Unfortunately, I have no way of showing the etymology of German words to prove when a name like Poenradt would have been created.
I suppose this might be more evidence to bolster the claim that John Penrod is the son of Johannes Wilhelm & Gertrudy Poenradt. For simplicity's sake, I'd like to believe that, although I know we may never have the records to prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Thanks for reading all the way through this post if you did!
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