Sadye Irene (Fleming) Wildermuth

Sadye Irene Fleming was born 15 July 1901 in Waverly, West Virginia — the small Pleasants County town on the Ohio River south of Marietta — to Wesley Fleming and Verona B. Sheppard Fleming. She spent most of her life in Marietta, Ohio, the river town across the state line her family married into.

On 31 December 1920 — New Year’s Eve, age nineteen — she married Earl A. Wildermuth of Marietta, opening the Fleming line into the Wildermuth shoemaker family that Johann Michael Wildermuth had founded there in the 1840s. (The date follows Sadye’s own 1976 Marietta Times obituary, which gives “Dec. 31, 1920” — the reading the archive uses per Chuck’s July 2026 decision. The family GEDCOM and Robert Earl’s own genealogy instead record 31 December 1921; the one-year gap between her obituary and the compiled genealogy is noted but unresolved.) The marriage is the seam at which the Fleming / Sheppard branch of Chuck’s maternal ancestry joins the Wildermuth / Württemberg branch — the two sides Robert Earl would later research and write up across his retirement.

The earliest portraits — c. 1919 and c. 1920

Two photographs of Sadye from before her marriage now sit in the archive — the earliest images of her here:

• Graduation portrait c. 1919 — a soft-focus studio portrait at eighteen, the family-typed caption box identifying it as her graduation picture.
• On a porch in plaid, c. 1920 — a candid snapshot on the concrete stoop of a wood-clapboard house, the early-1920s side-coiled “headphone braids” hairstyle and two-tier plaid dress placing it close to the same window.

The two images sit at the start of her adult life — before the 31 December 1920 marriage, before the five children, before the Wildermuth-shoemaker household she would help run for the next fifty-five years.

Five children

She and Earl raised five children, all of whom survived her. Chuck’s grandfather was the eldest:

• Robert Earl Wildermuth — Chuck’s grandfather; the B-24 navigator, 1948 Stanford BA on the GI Bill, lieutenant colonel of the Pentagon years, the retired genealogist whose memoirs and combat log this archive is built around. By the time of Sadye’s death he had retired to Castleberry, Florida, which is why the obituary places him there. (The obituary lists him as “Robert A.” — a newspaper transcription error; the correct middle initial is E. for Earl.)
• Carl E. Wildermuth — of Marietta.
• Ruth I. (Wildermuth) Ridenour — of Newark, Ohio.
• Betty J. (Wildermuth) Haddox — of Newark, Ohio.
• Norma J. (Wildermuth) Gault — of Hebron, Ohio.

Nine grandchildren by the time of her death, four of whom were Robert Earl’s: Terrie Lee, Sandra Sue, Robert E. Jr., and Debra.

Her siblings

Robert Earl’s own genealogy documents the full family: Sadye was the eighth of Verona and Wesley Fleming’s fourteen children — near the middle, not one of the youngest as an earlier reading of her obituary had it. Her siblings, in birth order, were Walter George (1886), Della (1888), Nora (1890), Mary (1892), Howard (1895), Frank (1897), May (1899, died in infancy), Sadye herself (1901), Etha (1904), Diatha (1904, Etha’s twin), Belle (1905, died at two weeks), Genevieve (died in infancy), LaVerna (1907), and Grace (c. 1910, died in infancy). By her 1976 death the survivors were her sisters Mrs. LaVerna (Fleming) Raison of Newark, Ohio and Mrs. Etha (Fleming) Becker of Columbus, Ohio — the Newark concentration (Sadye’s daughters Ruth and Betty and sister LaVerna all there) marking a Fleming-side community the family stayed near.

The end

She died at 1:30 p.m. the day before her obituary ran, at Marietta Memorial Hospital, age 75. Her husband Earl survived her. Funeral services were held at McClure-Schafer Funeral Home in Marietta; burial at Valley Cemetery. Their address was 320 Harmar Street, Marietta.

The Welsh-Irish self-identification, and what Robert Earl actually found

Sadye told her son Robert Earl, when he interviewed her about her family history in late 1971, that she was “of Welsh-Irish extraction” — “but she never seemed quite sure.” That uncertainty is itself a recurring 20th-century pattern, the daughter of immigrants generations removed from the source carrying a hazy family-memory ethnic label.

Robert Earl’s eighteen-year genealogical research on the Fleming line corrected the picture. He traced the Flemings back to John Fleming of Montgomery County, Maryland in the 1750s — with the earliest material from his pen-pal Michael G. Roberts of Akron, Ohio, a fellow Fleming genealogist Robert Earl never met in person but corresponded with for years. Robert Earl’s note in 1990:

I have closely checked all of his information and except for the John Fleming who came from Ireland (he was Scotch however — Scotch Irish or a Scot living in Northern Ireland) I have verified all of the information.

So the family memory of “Welsh-Irish” turned out to be Scotch-Irish — specifically Scots living in Northern Ireland — who came to colonial Maryland in the 1750s. This was one of the major American immigration streams of the 18th century — the Scotch-Irish from Ulster who came down through Pennsylvania and out into Maryland and Virginia, then on west and south. The Flemings reached the Marietta side of the Ohio River through that stream.

Why Sadye had no birth record

A separate finding from Robert Earl’s research: when Sadye applied for Social Security, she was unable to produce a birth certificate — despite being born in Waverly, West Virginia in 1901. Her birth had never been officially recorded. Robert Earl’s explanation in the 1990 Heritage:

Travel throughout rural West Virginia in 1900 was extremely difficult. The hilly terrain, the lack of adequate roads, the fording of countless streams made rural travel most difficult… It is easy to understand why births in rural West Virginia never got recorded. There were no doctors in attendance at the birth (mostly mid-wives) and word of a birth was primarily spread by word of mouth with no one taking official notice.

Sadye eventually established her birth date through friends of the family attesting to her birth — the kind of community-affidavit proof that the U.S. Social Security Administration accepted as substitute documentation in such cases. Robert Earl did find the birth records of Sadye’s younger siblings in the Wood County Court House in Parkersburg, but never Sadye’s own.

Sources: The Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 1990; Sadye I. Wildermuth obituary (Mrs. Earl Wildermuth), Marietta Times, c. 1976; FamilySearch tree.