James Wesley Fleming

James Wesley Fleming — known in the family as Wesley — was the father of Sadye Irene Fleming, who married Earl A. Wildermuth and became Robert Earl Wildermuth’s mother. He is Chuck’s maternal great-great-grandfather on the Fleming-Dunbar line.

A West Virginia farmer, born before West Virginia

He was born 20 December 1857 at Arnolds Creek, Doddridge County, in what was still Virginia — West Virginia would not become a separate state until 20 June 1863, in the middle of the Civil War.

Corrected, August 2026. This page carried 1855 for years, on the reasoning that he died “recorded as age 84,” which needs a late-1855 birth — and it said so against Robert Earl Wildermuth’s own consistent 1857.

His certified birth register entry says 1857, in Book 1 page 9 of the Doddridge County original book, with his father Thomas, his mother Martha, Arnolds Creek, and “Occupation of Father: Farmer.”

And the “84” was never evidence. Robert Earl’s own account of the death is that “noone knew who his father and mother were, when or where he was born nor his age.” The age on that record was a guess by people who did not know the answer. He went to the courthouse in 1984 and got the register. He was 82.

And the register calls him John W. The certificate reads “Jno. Wesley Fleming,” which this archive flagged as an open question; the transcribed Doddridge birth register confirms it — the child born 20 December 1857 to Thomas and Martha was entered as John W. James is a later family usage. Thomas and Martha in fact registered two sons as John, in 1857 and 1866; at home the first was Wesley and the second was John.

His birthplace is one of the documentary anchors of the family’s deep West Virginia roots: the upper-Ohio-valley hill country south of Marietta, the same Appalachian-frontier region Verona Belle Dunbar would also be born into fourteen years later (in 1869, Wood County). Arnold’s Creek had been settled a generation earlier by Lewis Fleming (b. ~1807) — the deep Fleming ancestor Robert Earl Wildermuth called “almost an enigma.” The GEDCOM closes the descent that Robert Earl could not: Wesley’s father was Lewis’s eldest son Thomas Bailey Fleming (b. 1830), making Lewis his grandfather — Lewis → Thomas Bailey → Wesley → Sadye.

He married Verona Belle (Dunbar) Fleming at Parkersburg on 7 October 1885, when he was 29 and she was 16 (she married under the name Mary V. Sheppard, her adoptive family’s surname — not, as this archive once had it, a prior married name). Their daughter Sadye Irene Fleming was born 15 July 1901, the eighth of the fourteen children Wesley and Verona raised across a quarter-century — most delivered without a physician in a Wood County log cabin, ten still living at the 1910 census. Per Sadye’s 1976 obituary her surviving sisters were Mrs. LaVerna Raison (Newark, OH) and Mrs. Etha Becker (Columbus, OH).

The log house on the Ohio River

A Fleming cousin, Josephine (Fleming) Cox (b. 1900), gave Robert Earl a firsthand picture of Wesley’s household in a 1985 letter: “Uncle Wesley lived over on the Ohio River in a log house; they had a large family.” She remembered his home as “a big old log cabin just up the road and over on the Ohio River” near the old Burnt Hill Cemetery east of Williamstown, Wood County — the childhood home of his daughter Sadye. Its most vivid feature in her memory was Wesley’s big johnboat: the Fleming boys would load the girls in and push it, wading and swimming, clear out to the Ohio River’s steamer channel. (The fuller recollection, centered on Verona, is on her page.)

The portrait — in vest and watch-chain, c. 1910s-1920s

A single photograph of Wesley Fleming survives in the family papers, surfaced June 2026 from Chuck’s keeping. He stands in a sunlit yard, slim and weathered, in a fedora hat, a button-down shirt with bow-tie, a light-colored vest with a watch chain looping down to the pocket, dark trousers, and dark boots. His hands are at his back, his pose three-quarter to the camera, mustache neatly trimmed. Behind him a porch with arched detail trim and a low picket fence are partially visible.

Dating reads c. 1910s-1920s by the photographic paper, his apparent age (mid-to-late 50s through mid-60s), and the bow-tie-and-vest dress that fits the working-class West Virginia rural style of that decade. The pocket watch and watch chain suggest a Sunday-best or church-bound moment, not field clothing — this is the dressed Wesley, not the working farmer.

Where he died — and what it set in motion

The archive long recorded only that he died “at Marietta.” His grandson’s Fleming typescript says where:

“James Wesley Fleming died in the Washington County Home for Men just outside Marietta, Ohio on 2 October 1940 … At the time of his death, noone knew who his father and mother were, when or where he was born nor his age.”

The county home. A sharecropper who had spent his working life on other men’s land ended in the public institution for indigent men, and the people at his funeral could not name his parents.

Robert Earl was sixteen, and he took it as an injustice that lasted him the rest of his life:

“I’ve always felt that this was wrong for everybody should have a heritage … No man who walked this earth and helped build this great country should leave this world without his descendents knowing where he came from and when and what his contributions were. This factor has been one of my driving forces to pursue this 20 year search for my ancestors.”

Every document in this archive traces back to that sentence. The letters to German town halls, the courthouse trips, the fourteen charts, the will hunted down through a Chester County archivist — all of it began because his grandfather died unaccounted for in the Washington County Home for Men.

The irony is complete: the man nobody could place is now one of the better-documented people here — his own birth register entry among the documents, obtained by the grandson who was sixteen at the graveside.

(The typescript gives his age at death as 83. On the register’s 1857 he was 82, and the death record’s 84 came from the same people who could not name his parents.)

The 1922 widower

When Verona Belle Dunbar Fleming died on 27 October 1922 at Marietta, Washington County, Ohio, age 53, Wesley was 66 and had been with her for at least two decades. He outlived her by eighteen years, dying on 2 October 1940, aged 82, of chronic myocarditis (per the certificates), and was buried two days later, on 4 October 1940. He lived to see his daughter Sadye marry Earl Adam Wildermuth, and to see his grandson Robert Earl Wildermuth born (6 October 1924) and grow into a young man — Robert Earl was 16 when his maternal grandfather died.

Robert Earl’s 1989 memoir records his father Earl Adam’s lament that “neither my mother’s mother nor his mother lived until my sister and I were old enough to remember them” — the absent grandmothers being Verona Dunbar Fleming and Flora Schlicher Wildermuth, both dead by 1922. Wesley Fleming was a present grandfather, the surviving senior on the Fleming side across Robert Earl’s childhood and adolescence.

See also

• Verona Belle (Dunbar) Fleming — his wife
• Sadye Irene Fleming — his daughter, Robert Earl’s mother
• Robert Earl Wildermuth — his grandson, Chuck’s maternal grandfather

Sources: his certified Doddridge County birth register entry, Book 1 p. 9, for the 20 December 1857 birth, Arnolds Creek, and his parents; Eesley/Wildermuth GEDCOM tree (June 2026 trace) — FamilySearch tree ID LVH9-QPM, which gives 20 Dec 1855 (superseded), death 2 Oct 1940 Marietta Ohio, burial 4 Oct 1940. The portrait is from Chuck’s keeping, shared June 2026. The log-house recollection is from the 1985 letter of Josephine (Fleming) Cox to Robert Earl Wildermuth, in the Wildermuth & Bain book Fleming section (pp. 98–99).