Stories & memoirs

Long-form narrative: memoirs, the combat log, the register, travelogues, ancestor sketches, letters.

• Robert Earl Wildermuth — life story
  memoir · ~1924–~1989

  Robert Earl Wildermuth's first-person autobiography: Marietta boyhood, the family's German origins, Stanford on the GI Bill, the Korean War, the Pentagon, teaching, and the long retirement turn to genealogy that produced the documents this archive is built on.

• The Big One: World War II
  combat-log · 1944-11–1945-05

  Robert Earl Wildermuth's dated mission-by-mission record as navigator on a B-24 with the 400th Squadron ("Black Pirates") of the 90th Bomb Group ("Jolly Rogers"), flown out of Biak, Leyte, and Mindoro — followed by a roster of his ten-man crew, each with a portrait.

• Eesley Family History (1985)
  register · 1985

  Mary Eesley Bean's 1985 indented descendant register of the Eesley family — generations I through VII, with Goldie immigration narrative, the flour-mill prehistory, and an address appendix (the appendix is excluded from the public site per the project's privacy rules). This is the relationship backbone for the paternal line in this archive.

• Eulogy for Charles McMaster Eesley
  eulogy · 2015-12

  Chuck's eulogy for his father, delivered at the memorial service for Charles McMaster Eesley in late 2015. Marietta, Ohio — the church on 7th Street, the house on Highland Ridge Road, the track at Marietta Middle School. The most personal document Chuck has contributed to the archive in his own voice.

• Eesley Line Research Notes — Oxford Public Library
  ancestor-sketch · 2018

  Three handwritten notebook pages compiled by a volunteer genealogist at the Oxford public library during Chuck and Lijie's 2018 visit, tracing the Eesley line backward from the 1851 Stratford-on-Avon census into 17th- and 18th-century Oxfordshire parish registers — plus a photograph of the source document itself: the 1799 Hanwell baptism register naming John as son of Joseph and Frances.