memoir
Robert Earl Wildermuth — life story
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 full original document is available here: Read Robert Earl’s life story (PDF).
This is the flagship document of the maternal line — Robert Earl’s account of his own life, written in the late 1980s. It carries the family story from his grandfather Johann Michael Wildermuth’s emigration from Württemberg in 1847, through the Marietta years, his own service in the Pacific aboard a B-24 with the 90th Bomb Group, his Stanford BA in Biological Sciences (1948), his career through Korea and the Pentagon, his teaching years, and into the genealogical research that became “Return to Germany” and the German-ancestor sketches.
The closing pages address themselves explicitly to “future genealogists.” This archive is one of the addressees.
A markdown transcription with the people, places, and combat episodes cross-linked into the rest of the site is queued for the next pass.