tree-export
Eesley · Wildermuth structured family tree (GEDCOM)
Dale Eesley's FamilySearch tree exported as GEDCOM 5.5.1 — 3,428 individuals across 1,510 families, rooted at Chuck (@I1@). The single most comprehensive structured account of the line in any format. Curated through years of careful, sourced work on FamilySearch.
The full GEDCOM file is available here: Download the Eesley · Wildermuth GEDCOM (1.3 MB, plain text).
This is the structured companion to the narrative record on the rest of this site. It carries (as of June 2026 with the Zhou side merged in) 3,465 individuals and 1,529 families — about fifty times the people-count that this site’s hand-curated people/ collection currently surfaces — and is the work of Dale Eesley, maintained over many years on FamilySearch with what Chuck has described as careful and well-sourced research.
What’s in it
The top surname counts give a fair picture of where the research has gone:
| Surname | Count |
|---|---|
| Chenoweth | 85 |
| Hill | 73 |
| Fleming | 66 |
| Wildermuth | 57 |
| White | 48 |
| Cline | 48 |
| Foster | 45 |
| Eesley | 44 |
| Way | 43 |
| Kelley | 42 |
| Knowlton | 40 |
The Eesley count being smaller than several surnames the Eesleys married into is itself a feature of an honest tree: the Eesleys are a small family, and the surrounding 19th- and 20th-century American families they married into were larger. Chenoweth (Lillie Dale’s family) and Fleming (Robert Earl’s mother Sadye Irene Fleming’s family) being the next two largest reflects the two big maternal connections on the paternal and maternal sides respectively.
How to read this alongside the rest of the site
This site is the narrative archive: photographs, stories, the long-form documents and the eulogies, the place pages with their then-and-now diptychs, the working notes from the Oxford library. The GEDCOM is the structured archive: every named individual, every parent/child link, every documented date, every source citation Dale has attached.
The two are designed to complement, not duplicate. The site’s people pages will not (and shouldn’t) ever try to be 3,400 entries. They are the people the family has a story for. The GEDCOM is for the question “who is this and how is she related?” — the kind of question a future Eesley or Wildermuth descendant will eventually need to ask and that the narrative pages can’t answer at depth.
Open the file in any genealogy program that supports GEDCOM 5.5.1 (Family Tree Maker, MacFamilyTree, Reunion, Gramps, the FamilySearch viewer itself, etc.) to navigate it as a tree.
The live tree
The GEDCOM here is a frozen snapshot. The live version — the canonical one — sits on FamilySearch, where Dale and Chuck continue to add and source individuals. The live tree is where any future research should land, and where reconciliations with new records (parish registers, census matches, immigration records, obituaries) get applied.
- Dale Eesley & Chuck Eesley’s FamilySearch family tree, rooted at Chuck — navigate ancestrally from there to any individual in the structured archive.
- A parallel version of the tree exists on Ancestry.com. Dale and Chuck treat the FamilySearch version as canonical for cross-referencing and sourcing; the Ancestry version is kept in rough sync but should be considered secondary.
Source: Exported from RootsMagic on 1 June 2026 by Dale Eesley; rooted at Charles Eric Eesley (@I1@).
Further reading
- FamilySearch — the free, public, source-cited genealogical platform Dale’s tree lives on.
- The GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification — the data format itself.
- Gramps — open-source desktop genealogy software that opens GEDCOM files.