Margaret Zelma (Wildermuth) Clarke
also known as Margaret Wildermuth, maiden; Mrs. Clarke after marriage; Margaret Wildermuth on the c. 1896 family-portrait caption
b. 1891-11-06, Marietta, Washington County, Ohio
d. 1943-10-25, Los Angeles, California (buried Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Long Beach). A family-labeled c. 1913 photograph annotates her death as 10-26-1943, one day later than the GEDCOM-recorded date.
Born 6 November 1891 in Marietta, Ohio, the middle child of William Clifford Wildermuth and Flora Schlicher, between her elder brother Charles Daniel and her younger sister Emma. Visible in the c. 1896 family group portrait at about age five — almost certainly the small girl seated front-row, in white, beside the smaller children.
The California life and a hard 1943
She died 25 October 1943 in Los Angeles, age 51, and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Long Beach — meaning by the end of her life she had moved from Marietta Ohio across the country to southern California. Whether she traveled the same Marietta-to-California route Robert Earl Wildermuth would take a few years later, or arrived via her brother Charles’s Kansas relocation, or by some other path, is open research.
Her death came six weeks after her father William Clifford’s death in Marietta on 10 September 1943 — the daughter dying soon after the father, in the middle of WWII. Both 1943 deaths in the same year are striking; the Marietta Times obituary archive might document either or both.
She is the “Margrette” of her brother Earl Adam Wildermuth’s 17 January 1972 family-history letter, which lists the nine siblings in birth order (“May, Charlie, William, Margrette, Blanche, Emma, Earl and Pearl and George”). Robert Earl’s own 1972 research notes name “my Aunt Margaret Wildermuth Clark who lived in Newport, Ohio” — the small Ohio-River town just east of Marietta on the old Route 7 corridor, where the family would stop on driving trips south toward St. Marys, West Virginia. Newport was evidently an earlier-life Ohio residence before the move to southern California where she died.
Two children — Walter and Eva Catherine “Kate” Clark
A labeled c. 1913 Front Street, Marietta photograph that surfaced in this archive in June 2026 names Margaret Zelma’s two children: Walter Clark (b. 6 April 1911) and Eva Catherine “Kate” Clark (b. 24 December 1912). The photograph is the c. 1913 Wildermuth-sisters’ children portrait on Front Street, with Margaret Zelma standing alongside the stroller holding Kate, with Walter on a small tricycle, and with her older sister Mae Clara’s children Ruth Mae Seyler and Robert Marion Seyler Sr. beside them. The print confirms that Margaret Zelma married a Clarke — her married surname appears on the print as “Margaret Wildermuth Clarke” — and that her children’s surname was Clark (the family appears to have dropped the final e in the children’s spelling, a common Anglo-spelling convention of the period).
Margaret’s husband’s first name, the date of her marriage, and the path of her later life from Marietta to Los Angeles are all open research. Walter and Kate are her two confirmed children as of this archive’s June 2026 update.
Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Margaret Zelma Wildermuth (GM6P-HNC); c. 1896 family group portrait caption card; c. 1913 Front Street Marietta photograph labeled by a family member around the time of Margaret’s October 1943 death.
