Etha May (Fleming) Becker
also known as Etha Fleming; Mrs. Etha (Fleming) Becker
b. 1904, Wood County, West Virginia
Etha May (Fleming) Becker was the younger sister of Sadye Irene (Fleming) Wildermuth — Chuck’s maternal great-grandmother — which makes Etha his great-grandaunt on the Fleming side. She was born in 1904 in Wood County, West Virginia, one of the fourteen children of James Wesley Fleming and Verona Belle (Dunbar) Fleming, and the twin of Diatha Fleming. Robert Earl Wildermuth found the birth records of Sadye’s younger siblings, Etha among them, in the Wood County Court House at Parkersburg.
She married a Becker and settled in Columbus, Ohio. When Sadye died in 1976, the obituary named just two surviving Fleming sisters — LaVerna (Fleming) Raison of Newark and “Mrs. Etha (Fleming) Becker of Columbus” — so Etha outlived most of her thirteen siblings.
In the photographs
Etha stands at her father James Wesley Fleming’s right in the c. late-1930s three-generation Fleming portrait, her young daughter Mary Evelyn in front of her — the aging patriarch flanked by two of his daughters and two granddaughters, a few years before his October 1940 death.
Sources: Sadye Fleming Wildermuth’s family record and 1976 obituary; Wildermuth Family of Marietta book, Fleming section (Robert Earl Wildermuth); family-labeled photograph transmitted by Chuck Eesley, 2026.
