Welcome to the Bohm Family website.  It is dedicated to providing interested readers with insight into a family and its history. The research presented here was conducted over a period of many years and is the result of the labor of many individuals, as well as the countless recollections of many ancestors. Over time, the site will be expanded and, when need be, corrected as new or more accurate information becomes available. The core portion of this investigation consists of a formal history of the Bohm Family and many of its constituent branches. Naturally, the stories of  the lives of people from other families will be  included when they intersect with  “the Bohms.”

        The story as it is told here touches on the lives of many individuals; in this respect it has much in common with other historical tales. If such stories are told well, readers might be able to discern a “plot” or story line in the events of the past. The narratives might even take on the proportions of an historical drama in which men and women almost step out from pages and computer screens to become “actors” playing roles in a larger epic. At some point, however, historians must confront the vexing notion that making comparisons between “writing history”  and  directing staged dramatic performances can create false or flawed images of what happened fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ago. Unlike the casts of theater-company presentations, historical characters had no rehearsals; there were no script revisions, no re-writes; in fact, historical “actors” had no scripts. Like those of us living in the present, they made do with the first and only “performances” they gave.

         Written histories, especially those written about families, are unlike staged performances in other ways: for instance, they have no real beginnings, nor, for the most part, do they have endings. It is up to those who tell the historical tales to invent these artificial contrivances. In the writing of history, beginnings and endings are merely points of reference. It is also up to historians to ascribe meaning to events, intentions, and to the scraps of evidence they use to tell stories. And with that admission we come around full circle in a sense. As historians construct tales to make sense of what happened, they are drawn, once again, into the irony of writing about the past; that is, they must turn chronologies of events and lists of names, places, ideas, objects, and actions, into stories or, if they are good at what they do, they might even create a “drama.” And so, we are back where we began, back to exercising Shakespeare’s metaphor of the world being a stage. What follows is a presentation of the Bohm family as its members acted out their parts and strutted their hours upon that stage.

—Fredric C. Bohm