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. 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.

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

She died 18 November 1919 in Marietta at age 49 — a death well before her time by modern standards, twenty-four years before her husband would die in 1943. Cause of death is open in the GEDCOM; the late-1919 timing is consistent with the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic’s final wave, which continued to claim American victims into late 1919 and early 1920, but other causes are equally possible. By 1919 her three children were all adults: Charles 30, Margaret 28, Emma 26.

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.