Charles Daniel Wildermuth

Born 4 February 1889 in Marietta, Ohio, the eldest son of William Clifford Wildermuth and Flora Schlicher — and second-eldest of their nine children (after Mae Clara, b. 1886). Visible in the c. 1896 family group portrait at about age seven — most likely the small boy in dark clothes in the front row. Older brother of Earl Adam (b. 1899) — making Charles Daniel Robert Earl Wildermuth’s paternal uncle.

The Kansas move

Of the nine William-Clifford-and-Flora children, Charles is the one who left Ohio for the West. He died 10 October 1945 in Kansas at age 56 — just weeks after the Japanese surrender that ended WWII — and was buried at Hoisington Cemetery in Hoisington, Barton County, Kansas. Hoisington is a small farming town in central Kansas, the kind of place a Marietta-born midwesterner could have ended up after working a railroad or wheat-belt career.

He is the “Charlie” of his brother Earl Adam Wildermuth’s 17 January 1972 family-history letter, the only C-name son among the nine siblings. Earl Adam recorded the Kansas chapter from family memory:

Bob your Uncle Charlie met his wife in Wichita Kans. She was a Marietta girl but went to Wichita with the people Charlie worked for she was their hired girl then they lived in Wichita thats where Charlie died and was burried.

Earl Adam’s account places the marriage and death at Wichita, and remembers the wife as a Marietta girl who had gone to Wichita as a family’s hired girl; the GEDCOM instead records the burial at Hoisington (about 90 miles northwest of Wichita) and names the wife as Eva “Effie” Barbara Schmidt. The two sources may describe the same Kansas life from different angles — a Wichita marriage and a later Hoisington burial — or the family memory may simply have blurred the central-Kansas geography. Children and the date and circumstances of the move are queued research.

Source: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Charles Daniel Wildermuth (GMLZ-MY4); c. 1896 family group portrait caption card.