"STOP THE PRESSES!" — Robert Earl Wildermuth retracts the Fleming line, 27 November 1998

Eight months after printing the 1998 pedigree charts and writing the thirteen-page Family Legacy, he threw out the top of it.

The letter opens:

“STOP THE PRESSES ! CIRCLE THE WAGONS !! PULL UP A CHAIR !!! and POUR A TALL COOL ONE !!!! Gross error in our Fleming family lineage but recoverable. I just learned that our oldest of Fleming ancestors were not 4 guys named John.”

What he retracted

He explains how he got there. Twenty-odd years earlier he had found a James Fleming he believed was a direct ancestor and gathered a great deal on him. Then, around 1992, two other Fleming researchers convinced him it was four John Flemings instead, so he spent years documenting Johns of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia back to 1708 — the line that appears on the March 1998 charts.

And then this, which is the sentence a careful researcher writes:

“There was one thing that bothered me a little that I could never quite prove but I accepted what I had found.”

What changed his mind was a book: “A Fleming Family with Colonial Ancestors in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania,” by William Allen and William Alpheous Fleming, a father-and-son pair of genealogists, printed in 1941. He describes it as thoroughly sourced from wills, marriage banns and courthouse records, and says plainly: “I accept this book as true and correct.” Its findings, he writes, demonstrate “conclusively that our John IV (my designation) was not the son of John III of Pennsylvania.”

He also turns on his own two sources. One, Mike Roberts of Akron, Ohio, other researchers told him was “grossly flawed.” The other was Josephine Fleming — the cousin whose three taped hours gave this archive its log-cabin recollections — and about her he is unsentimental:

“Josephine Fleming had nothing in writing and had done no research but only recalled hearing her parents talk about it. She was 80 years old so a lot of her remembrances are more than a little clouded.”

The instruction at the end is explicit:

“John Fleming Jr. and John Fleming III should be removed from my previous family history and James Fleming should be inserted in their place.”

What this archive is changing

Everything above John Fleming IV is withdrawn. That means the whole Maryland-and-Ireland pedigree published here from the March 1998 charts — John Fleming III, John Fleming Jr. the Cabin John tobacco planter, John Fleming Sr. the weaver of Ballyclare, County Antrim, Jean, and by extension the Whites and Hopkinses who married into that branch — rests on a line its own author repudiated before the year was out.

What survives: John Fleming IV himself, as Lewis Fleming’s father. Nothing in this letter touches that, and it is independently supported by his 1853 death record, whose informant was his son Eli B. Fleming, and by the 1827 consent note signed John Fleming.

And this was not his last word either. Five months later, in April 1999, he abandoned the search — “I’ve decided to turn my back on our John Fleming b. 1781… Still leaning towards Samuel or Patrick” — and turned to the Baileys and Bartletts instead. The James Fleming of this letter was a way-station, not a destination.

What replaces it is not yet known here. He says James Fleming was the progenitor and that he enclosed “a 10 generation Pedigree Chart and a rundown on James Fleming.” Neither enclosure has been photographed. From his September 1998 letter we know he then thought James Fleming Jr. was the son of a James born 1716 — but that was written while he still held the four-Johns view, so it cannot simply be carried across.

This is the correct outcome, not a setback. He tested a lineage he had published, found a better-sourced authority, and reversed himself in writing at seventy-four — having already circulated the wrong version to his cousins. The archive’s job is to follow him, including when he corrects himself.

A note on this archive’s own error: pages here presented the Ballyclare and Maryland generations on 15 August 2026 as his settled finding. They were his finding in March 1998. This letter is from November 1998, and it was in the same folder. The relevant pages now carry the retraction.

Source: typed letter, 27 November 1998, from Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers; in Chuck’s keeping. Photographed 2026.