William Wildermuth Jr.

William Wildermuth Jr. was the fifth child of William Clifford Wildermuth and Flora Schlicher Wildermuth — named for his father. Born 3 April 1896 in Marietta, Washington County, Ohio; died there 5 December 1897, age just twenty months and two days. The brief life of an infant in the late-nineteenth-century Marietta-area Wildermuth household.

The family loss of 1897

The Wildermuth family in 1896–97 was: William Clifford and Flora (married 1886, eleven years on), their children Mae Clara (10), Charles Daniel (7), Margaret Zelma (4-5), Emma (2-3), and infant William Jr. He died on 5 December 1897, two days before his father William Clifford’s 31st birthday on 8 December, and just over a year after his own April 1896 birth. This is the first known family loss of William Clifford and Flora’s marriage — the kind of late-nineteenth-century early-childhood death that ran through Marietta families across the decades the city’s water and germ-theory understanding caught up to its growing population.

After William Jr.’s death, the family went on to have Earl Adam and his twin sister Pearl in October 1899, George D. in 1902, and Blanche (dates unrecorded). The Earl Adam born in 1899 is Chuck’s great-grandfather Robert Earl Wildermuth’s father. The line continues; the infant William Jr. does not.

In the 1896 family portrait

The archive holds a c. 1896 Wildermuth family portrait of William Clifford and Flora with three of their children. If the youngest child in that portrait is the infant William Jr., this archive holds the only surviving photograph of him — an infant who would die before his second birthday. The 1896 portrait would have been taken in the same year of his April birth, possibly within his first months of life. Cast confirmation of the infant figure in that portrait is queued for the family-research layer.

Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Wildermuth family record; Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage.