The Name Bohm
An Introduction

Our surnames, the names we share with our ancestors, are curious things. They are laden with “coded” information that might contain clues about “who” our great, great grandparents were, or how they earned their livings, or perhaps, even how they lived. These same surnames are also stubborn, hostile witnesses to the past, obscuring behind the dark shadows of terminology the true identities of the men and women who bore them. Keep these observations in mind as you read this brief sketch about what the name Bohm might mean and what we can learn about it. As to other namesthat appear in the Bohm family history, names such as Hill, Parratt, Nichols, Percy, Lindemann, Opheim, Skog, Stiede, they also have etymologies and historical contexts; all are richly laden with equally significant historical symbolism.The surname Bohm, or Böhm from which it is derived, has a history as complex and paradoxical as any European name. While on the one hand the word’s etymology is firmly woven into European history in general, the actual name itself says almost nothing about the many individuals who have called themselves “Böhm” over the centuries.

To be sure, Böhm is a rather common German name today. One has only to flip through the telephone-book pages for any large German city to discover that there are many “Böhms.”  The literal meaning for Böhm is prosaic; it is nothing more than a shorthand way for saying “Bohemian,” that is “someone from Bohemia.” But its deeper and more subtle origins can be traced back more than two thousand years to an almost legendary epoch two centuries before Christ’s birth, a time when Rome began to expand its empire north beyond the Alps and into regions that are now France and Germany. There, north of the Alps, Roman legions encountered various and numerous barbarian tribes, uncivilized Gauls and Germans, all of which posed constant threats to the uneasy peace that Rome’s armies sought to impose along the Empire’s northern frontier.

In the second century B.C., members of one of these barbarian groups, a Gallic tribe called the Boii, were attacked by the Romans.  After a protracted struggle, Roman legions compelled the Boii to retreat north and east, from southern France (what is now Provence) through the Alps and into regions we know today as Bohemia and Bavaria. Part of the area in which they settled eventually came to be called “the Home of the Boii,” Boiohaemia—or as it is written today in English, “Bohemia.” The Boii ultimately were conquered several centuries later by a small but fierce Germanic tribe, the Marcomanni. Nonetheless, the Marcomanni did not survive long enough as an identifiable group to have their tribal name affiliated with the local geography. Their strong penchant for intertribal warfare led to their disappearance from history’s pages; fighting as allies of Atilla the Hun, the Marcomanni were decimated by Roman legions at the battle of Chalons in A. D. 451.

Following closely on the heels of the Marcomanni, a bewildering array of so-called “tribes” and peoples migrated into Bohemia and the rest of Central Europe. Each, in turn, conquered and then were eventually assimilated by the groups that preceded them. From the fifth through the tenth centuries, Germans, Avars, Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes maneuvered and struggled; all searched for places to live in the mountains and valleys of central Europe. After several hundred years of this activity, a complex pattern of ethnic distribution emerged, a pattern that continues to characterize much of Central Europe today.

One consequence of these “movements of peoples” was a large pocket of Germans, the “Sudetenland Germans,” settling in the Bohemian region of what is today Slovakia and the Czech Republic. These people later were joined by Germanic settlers who moved into the area between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. And because of their many decades of relative isolation from Germans to the north and west, the customs and dialects of these “Bohemian Germans” developed somewhat independently. After several generations, this independent development became apparent enough for distinctions to be made between so-called “Bohemians” and other Germans, distinctions that would lead to their actually being called “Bohemians.”

As time passed, the region’s name, in the shortened form Böhm, came to be used as a surname by many who migrated from there. The written form of the name varied, but most often it was rendered in German as “Böhm,” or “Böhme.” When Germans with names such as these emigrated to America they usually changed the spellings to accommodate the English alphabet, which does not normally use the umlaut as a diacritical mark. German names like Böhm or Böhme thus became Boehm, Boehme, Bohme, or simply Bohm.[1]

Although Hermann and August Böhm, two brothers who settled in western Cass County Dakota Territory in the late 1870s, bore a surname that suggested ancestral links to Bohemia, they themselves were from West Prussia. In other words, the family may well have had some connection to Bohemia; but, whatever that link might have been, it existed before the middle of the nineteenth century. If Bohm ancestors did actually come from Bohemia, the date of their migration to northern Germany remains unknown. It is possible, however, that such a move occurred as a result of one of the numerous religious upheavals that swept central Europe beginning in early-modern times. One possibility is that the Böhm ancestors left Bohemia during the Hussite wars of the 1420s and 1430s. Being good Catholic Germans, they may have been intimidated by the violence and religious heresy of the Czech followers of Jan Hus.

Alternatively, the Böhm ancestors could have gone north to Germany during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). After all, the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517, had a dramatic impact on Bohemia. The Bohm family, falling victim to Lutheran heresy in this theory, might have fled to friendlier, Protestant regions in Prussia when Catholic armies of the Holy Roman Emperor returned Bohemia to Papal allegiance after 1622. Of course, other possibilities exist. The Böhms could have returned to Germany at almost any time seeking economic gain, or their reasons for leaving Bohemia may have been nothing more than the lure of a better life in Germany..[2]

Whatever their reasons for leaving Bohemia, the Bohms were in West Prussia in the area known as Deutsch Krone, before the middle of the nineteenth century. Ironically, that part of Europe, like Bohemia itself, was claimed by more than one culture. And as the doctrines of nationalism spread by Napoleon and the French Revolution began to bear deadly fruit, a number of cultural and ethnic groups, especially Germans and Poles, laid claim to the region. For more than four centuries Deutsch Krone and the small agricultural village of Breitenstein where the Böhm family lived, were ruled by the King of Poland. On many occations during that time Deutsch Krone and the people who lived there had been reduced to being "the spoils of war" and awarded to the victor in one of the innumerable conflicts that devastated the area.

By the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, three “carriers” of the name Böhm, a name linguistically linked by to a warlike Celtic tribe that once lived in Provence and then in a geographic region of Central Europe, left Prussia and northern Europe, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, to settle in Chicago, Illinois, and in Dakota Territory forty-five miles southwest of Fargo.

This website is devoted to telling the story of these young men, and of Hermann Bohm in particular, his family, his descendants and their extended families. In outline, it describes what they did and how they all lived their lives. It is formed out of a few fleeting glimpses, from a few shadows cast across landscapes, from bits and pieces of documentary evidence, from some family stories passed from one generation to the next.

[1]    The etymology of the name Bohm can better be traced in German.  The word “Bohemia” in German is written as Böhmen. The alternative way to write the “ö” (an “o” with an umlaut above it) is to use the letter combination “oe.”  Thus, the alternative spelling for Böhmen is Boehmen. The derivation of the name Boehm results when the final letters, “en,” are dropped.

[2]    At best, both of the theories presented here are pure speculation. The Böhm ancestors could have migrated from Bohemia to Germany as the result of the famines of the 1780s, or as a result of the revolutions of 1848.  The name Böhm might simply have been given to the illegitimate son of a Bohemian mercenary, a byproduct of one of the many wars fought in Germany.  Strictly speaking, one guess is as good as another without additional research. The ideas presented here are descriptions of things that could have happened during times when wholesale migrations of Bohemian Germans back to Germany occurred. Throughout medieval, early modern, and modern history, Europeans have been on the move almost constantly. The result is a marvelous, complex mixing of nationalities and ethnic groups that renders efforts to trace the genealogy of anyone outside the professional classes or aristocracy extremely difficult. Even when lineages are unearthed, they generally prove to be tedious listings of generation upon generation of names, dates, places, peasants, serfs, traders, and burgers.

     What this “family history” seeks to do is to get beyond such acts of enumeration and name listing to trace the patterns of people’s lives. Prior to 150 years ago, no specifics have been unearthed about the particular Böhm family whose sons left for the New World in the early 1870s to settle Chicago and in Cass County, Dakota Territory. It is likely that information exists somewhere in Europe, buried in records to be found in town halls, churches, or archives.  The Böhms could have been merchants, though this is not likely given the fact that two of the three family members who came to America sought to possess agricultural land and the third ended his days as a “day laborer” in Chicago It is likely that Herman, August, and Friedrich were the sons of peasants or small freeholders—people who invariably thought of wealth in terms of tracts of real estate.