Flora (Schlicher) Wildermuth

Flora Schlicher was born 24 August 1870 in Marietta, Washington County, Ohio, to the local Schlicher family of Marietta — a German-immigrant family of the same generation as the Johann Michael Wildermuth line her future husband descended from. Her father was Theobald “David” Schlicher, the Schlicher patriarch.

Why the Schlicher name matters in this archive

In 1989, Chuck’s grandfather Robert Earl Wildermuth closed his memoir’s German-trip travelogue with a line about the family research he still hoped to complete:

“I hope to return to the home towns of grandma Catherina Boeshar and hopefully that of Johann Peter Schlicher at some later date.”

The Schlicher of that sentence is Flora’s family line. Robert Earl was still trying to find Johann Peter Schlicher’s German hometown when the memoir was written — and Johann Peter was Flora’s grandfather, her father Theobald’s father.

His own papers name the village. His printed ancestor charts give Johann Peter’s birthplace as Adenbach, in the Kusel district of the Rhineland-Palatinate — on the charts’ authority alone, with no register or document yet seen to confirm it. The Schlicher emigration from Germany is part of the same mid-19th-century wave that brought Johann Michael Wildermuth to Marietta — both families settled in Washington County, Ohio, and merged through Flora and William Clifford’s marriage.

If that holds, there is a symmetry in it Robert Earl seems not to have remarked on. The two home towns he named together in that sentence — his great-grandmother Catharina Boeshar’s Breitenbach and his great-great-grandfather Johann Peter Schlicher’s Adenbach — are in the same Landkreis Kusel. Flora’s line and her husband’s grandmother’s line would both run back to the same small stretch of the Palatinate.

The 1896 family portrait

Flora is the seated woman in the light dress at front-row center in the c. 1896 family group portrait — about 26 at the time, photographed with her young children at her side in the canonical Victorian young-mother family-portrait pose. Her husband William Clifford stands at the back-left of the group, her mother-in-law Catharina Boeshar is at the back holding her youngest daughter Emma high on her shoulder, and her sister Emma Schlicher stands at the back-right with William’s younger brother Edward Frederick. The portrait is the earliest dated Wildermuth-side photograph in this archive.

The c. 1915 family studio portrait

Flora stands at the left in the family’s c. 1915 studio portrait — in a dark dress with a white lace bodice, beside her seated husband William Clifford and two of their sons. Identified by Chuck Eesley’s July 2026 face-tagging, it was taken only a few years before her death and is one of the last images of Flora.

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The 1919 death

The child of July 1901

The Marietta Daily Register of 2 July 1901 carried four lines the archive had never seen — reported in Robert Earl’s abstracts:

“WILDERMUTH CHILD. The three week old child of Mr. and Mrs. William Wildermuth, on East Greene, died this morning of cholera infantum. The parents have the sympathy of all in their sad affliction.”

A baby born to Flora about 11 June 1901, dead on 2 July. No name is given — three weeks was not always long enough for one. Cholera infantum was the summer diarrhoeal disease that killed infants in American river towns by the thousand before clean milk and refrigeration; July was its season, and East Greene Street was where the family lived.

The archive counts Flora’s children as nine. This one is not among them, so the true figure is at least ten births. Her daughter Margaret, nine years old that summer, had been living with her Schlicher grandparents at 739 Green Street the year before.

The 1919 death

She died 18 November 1919 in Marietta at age 49 — twenty-four years before her husband would die in 1943.

The cause is now known: diabetes mellitus. Robert Earl’s table of causes of death, copied from the certificates, gives it plainly. This page previously recorded the cause as open and speculated about the final wave of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic; that speculation is withdrawn.

The date is difficult to read without wincing. Insulin was first given to a patient in January 1922 — a little over two years after she died. Before it existed, diabetes in an adult was managed with starvation diets and was effectively always fatal. There was nothing available in Marietta in 1919, or anywhere else, that would have saved her. By 1919 the three eldest — the children of the c. 1896 group portrait — were well into adulthood: Charles 30, Margaret 28, Emma 26. Her sixth child Earl Adam was twenty. (This sentence formerly read “her three children,” a holdover from when the archive knew only the three in that portrait; she had nine.)

She was buried in Section C, Lot 30 at Oak Grove Cemetery, in a two-grave lot her husband William Clifford would join in 1943. The cemetery register records no marker on it: “No stones on lot.” The register also gives her burial as 23 November 1919 and her age as 50, against the archive’s 21 November and 49 — small clerical differences, neither better sourced than the other.

She is Robert Earl Wildermuth’s grandmother and Chuck’s great-great-grandmother on the maternal Wildermuth side. Her sixth child Earl Adam Wildermuth (b. 1899) is the line that runs forward to Robert Earl, to Terrie, to Chuck. Robert Earl was born in 1924, five years after Flora’s 1919 death; he never met her.

Source: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Flora Schlicher (LWBF-S45); the typed caption card accompanying the c. 1896 family group portrait; Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir for the Schlicher research context.