Ten ancestors, and what killed them

One typed page, five couples, four columns — and the last column is the one this archive has never had. Causes of death for ten direct ancestors, evidently copied off death certificates.

Person	Died	Age	Cause
John Michael Wildermuth	7 Feb 1903	72	Asthma
Catherina Boeshar	17 Oct 1933	93	Acute myocarditis
Theobald David Schlicher	16 Feb 1912	78	Apoplexy
Eva Barbara “Effie” Schmidt	24 Oct 1915	78	Abscess of lung
William Clifford Wildermuth	10 Sep 1943	77	Coronary thrombosis
Flora Schlicher	18 Nov 1919	49	Diabetes mellitus
James Wesley Fleming	2 Oct 1940	77	Chronic myocarditis
Verona Belle Dunbar	27 Oct 1922	53	Apoplexy
Earl Adam Wildermuth	6 Dec 1977	78	Cerebral haemorrhage
Sadye Irene Fleming	9 Aug 1976	75	Multiple myeloma

The column alignment can be trusted, and two independent checks show why: Verona’s apoplexy is already in this archive from her death certificate, and John Michael’s asthma appears in the Washington County probate abstract. Both land exactly where the table puts them.

Flora died of diabetes, three years before insulin

Her page has said for a long time that the cause was unknown, and speculated — reasonably — about the last wave of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, since she died in November 1919 at forty-nine.

It was diabetes mellitus.

The timing is hard to read without wincing. Insulin was first isolated in 1921 and first given to a patient in January 1922. Flora died in November 1919. Before insulin, type 1 diabetes in an adult was managed by starvation diets and was essentially always fatal; there was nothing anyone in Marietta could have done.

She left a twenty-year-old son, Earl Adam, who married the following winter.

What the rest of the column shows

Heart disease runs through this table. Acute myocarditis, coronary thrombosis, chronic myocarditis — and apoplexy and cerebral haemorrhage, which are both strokes. Seven of the ten deaths are cardiovascular.

And the ages are not bad. Setting aside Flora at 49 and Verona at 53, the others died at 72, 93, 78, 78, 77, 77, 78 and 75 — a run of late-seventies deaths across three generations of shoemakers, firemen, sharecroppers and factory hands. Catherina Boeshar reached 93, having been born in a Palatine village in 1840.

A note on Verona’s entry. Her death is given here as apoplexy, and her 1922 obituary describes “a twelve weeks’ illness of apoplexy” — the two together are what let this archive reconcile the family story of her collapsing on the courthouse steps with her dying at home three months later.

Use the causes; do not use the births

The birth dates in this table are unreliable, and it is worth saying why. It is an early compilation — probably late 1970s — and three entries are wrong by the archive’s later evidence:

	This table	Better source
James Wesley Fleming born	24 December 1863	20 December 1857 — certified birth register
Sadye Irene Fleming born	15 June 1901	15 July 1901
John Michael Wildermuth born	1831	23 August 1830 — Großaspach baptismal register

James Wesley’s date is out by six years and Sadye’s by a month. This is the same table where his age at death is given as 77, which fits neither 1863 nor 1857 exactly.

So: an early sheet, superseded on births, and valuable only for the last column — where the entries came off certificates rather than out of memory.

Source: typed table of births, deaths, ages and causes of death for ten ancestors, c. late 1970s, from Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers; in Chuck’s keeping. Photographed 2026.