Eesley · Wildermuth
A narrative archive of two American families — one out of Stratford-on-Avon by way of a Scottish flour mill, one out of Württemberg by way of Marietta — meeting in a single generation.
This site was inspired by the work of Robert Earl Wildermuth, Chuck's maternal grandfather, who in his retirement turned to genealogy and wrote the memoirs, the combat log, the “Return to Germany” travelogue, and the German-ancestor sketches that frame everything maternal here. He closed his last manuscript by addressing “future genealogists.” This site is one of them answering. Their work is the archive; this site is the next layer of it.
Enter
The Zhou and Li side — live and growing, in two languages. The Eesley and Wildermuth lines have a year of intensive work behind them; the Zhou and Li families of Qingdao, Shandong — Lijie's line, both her father's Zhou family and her mother's Li and Shang families — is built out four generations deep and being extended branch by branch. Every Zhou- and Li-side page carries both English and 中文 versions on the same page — paragraphs in English at the top, then a parallel 中文 section below. Open the English guide to Lijie's family to navigate that side in English, or the dedicated 中文 hub for the Chinese-first entry point — or read any Zhou- or Li-side person, place, or story page in either language. Name characters and earlier generations are still being confirmed with the family.
The keepers of this archive
Four keepers built the paternal side. Mary Eesley Bean's 1985 indented register laid down the relationships from Stratford through to Marietta. Margaret “Maggie” Eesley's four-generation photo archive carries the faces. Aunt Jeanne (Eesley) Kamiab contributed many of the photographs and the oral history this site relies on — including the wartime account of how Stella Sunn came to live with the Eesleys. Roberta Burnes — Helen Burnes's daughter, Chuck's first cousin once removed — has carried forward much of the Charles Leonard Eesley material into the next generation, including the labeled c. 1973–1975 Charles Leonard reunion portrait at Highland Ridge, the family-label transcription that resolved the c. 1948–1949 Charles Leonard group portrait, the 2019 family-email reconstruction that placed Stella Sunn's arrival within months of Uncle Lyle's Cabanatuan death, and the upstream provenance of the deepest-ancestor portraits of Joseph Hill Chenoweth and John K. Timmons (the family album she inherited via the Burnes–Eesley line, which reached this site via Maggie's deck). She also keeps the 1940s Eesley letter collection — a large body of Charles Leonard's wartime correspondence in his own hand, almost indecipherable, not yet read or digitized; the single most consequential undeciphered source still to come.
A fifth keeper, still at work, is Dale Eesley, whose careful and thorough genealogical work on FamilySearch is the most current and best-sourced single account of the line. Chuck collaborates with Dale on the same FamilySearch tree; a parallel Ancestry.com version of the tree exists as well, but Dale and Chuck treat the FamilySearch one as canonical. The structured tree as a downloadable GEDCOM — 3,428 individuals across 1,510 families — is here too. It is the source future Eesley genealogists should consult first.
On living people
Living people get a light touch. Specific birth dates, exact home locations, and minor children's names are not surfaced for anyone who hasn't explicitly opted in. The address appendix from Mary Bean's 1985 register is held offline. The fuller editorial note is on the archive's privacy page.