This website is dedicated to the Chelsea & Zella Wildern
family and their descendants.
Thank you for visiting!
This website is maintained by Bill Smedley. I'm the son of the late Amert Wildern-Smedley. My mother inspired and encourage me to work on the Wildern Family genealogy, but she never saw the Wildern website. She didn't even know about the 'World Wide Web' and she never saw a web browser. This site has been in existance about 11 years now, but it goes through perodic updates because of advancements in technology and for security reasons. If it isn't updated, the site enters a state of depreciation which causes parts of the site to not work properly.
In June of 2016, the Wildern Website went through a complete transformation and all of the underlying structure was updated. You may have noticed some things are a little different, but it's easier to maintain since it now has automatic updates. The system tells me when updates are available and all I have to do is click a button to perform the update. This amazes me and hopefully it will make things much easier in the future.
Any input or suggestions you have are greatly appreciated.
I hope you enjoy your stay,
-Bill
The 2005 Wildern Family Reunion was held at Lynda Steensma (Amert's daughter) & Bert Steensma's cottage on the Muskegon River near Newaygo, Michigan.
Family members came from all over Michigan, California and Florida to attend the reunion. Gayle and Keith came from Indianopolis. She is Ruth Wildern's granddaughter and the daughter of Shirley Smith-Whitmore. It was great, because that was the first time many of us had ever met her.
The only member of the original Chelsea & Zella Wildern Family to attend was Dorothy Wildern-Lyon. She is 94 years old. Unfortunately, all of her siblings are deceased. (update - Dorothy died Jan. 28th, 2011 about a month short of her 100th birthday). One interesting note is that two of Dorothy's siblings, Harp and Audrey, both reached the 100th birthday, but then died shortly after.
Most of the Lyon family attended. Same for the Nash-Perkins family, the Carrigan family and the Smedley family.
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