 Hi, I'm Mindy Silva. Welcome to the Wikitree Challenge. We're in one week, our team of volunteers will work together to uncover as much as possible about the family history of a notable person. We found some successes, a few tragedies, a lot of interesting stories in between. So Christine, who is captaining this week, is going to walk you through what we found. Everybody who volunteers to research all of these lines has a tremendous amount of fun with it. It's really great. It only goes for seven days, and everybody just scrambles like mad to find that one record or that one newspaper article that will prove that one person's parents and then we can break through a brick wall and keep on going. We have Wikitreeers around the entire globe that work in all sorts of areas in specific countries and different repositories that they can pull records from, which is really, really great and so helpful. You guys did such a good job on that line. I know the ham family. Maddie did a ton of work on that and some other people worked on that line as well. But they were just a serious genealogy gold mine. There was so much documented on that family. They were all named the same thing. Yeah, just the birthdays. Everybody was either a Johann or a Friedrich. And you can alternate between whichever one you want in your life. So you can say, like, in my childhood, I'll be Johann. And as I get older, I'll be Daniel. And we'll switch it to English. And now I'm John. I'm looking at the descendant chart right now, Johann Friedrich. Where'd it go? Oh, there's so many lunics now. This is crazy. And whose fault is that? And then the inconsistency with spelling too. You know, like, I saw them spell living itch with like a G instead of a C or and I think in Germany, maybe it's with a U. I don't know. Is there a German here, Thomas? Would it be like Lugannich? Oh, no. Not from the records we were looking at, as far as I can tell. Oh, Florian was everywhere. But he was all over the place. The addresses are really useful, too, because the newspaper articles often reference the address. So it's a good way of cross-checking. But everybody did a really great job. And I think we've got a lot to present tomorrow. So I'm really excited about that. These are your four sets of great grandparents. And in order, we're just going to start from the top and work our way down. And because genealogy is always a little bit tricky, our chief Chris got into it and was looking for some records and trying to connect some people. And he got a little confused and turned around because he ran into some similar names. But he finally figured out that your Thomas Jefferson Wales, who married Mary Clem, also had a sister, Mary Wales, who married Mary's brother, Thomas Clem. So this is Cord's World War I registration card that he signed himself in 1918. When they asked him what he did for a living, he said farming. And when they asked him who his employer was, he wrote myself in the box. He listed his next of kin as his wife, Inez, and he gives his birthday as January the 11th, 1877. Now Tillman Horn Holland was born in 1794. He was Cord's great-grandfather through his maternal grandmother. He was born in South Carolina to Thomas Holland and Prudence Leggett. And he actually served as a private for the Mississippi Territory during the War of 1812. The Mississippi Territory supplied over 6,000 men to the war effort. So we were able to push the trees back several generations and there are some great photos already on the profiles for James Augustus, or Gus Brock, from another descendant of this family and another great photo of James's mother, Eliza, and Malak. And we go on to Clarence Gravey and Bessie Turner. How did you pronounce that, Don? Gravey. Okay, I was told it was Gravey. Yeah, we had several pronunciations given to us. There might actually be some French back in there, so they weren't really sure. So Clarence actually was the one who was stabbed to death. So he was involved in an altercation with a gentleman by the name of Frank Hicks. Clarence suffered a fatal stab wound to the back and passed away shortly after midnight on the warning of October the 12th, 1936. It was reported in the newspaper that Frank, who was later charged with first degree murder and then sentenced for second degree murder, had come to the residence and initiated the incident. At no point in any of those articles that we were able to find did it mention what the problem was and why he was so angry to start that fight in the first place. Frank was also- The poker game makes sense because it was really late at night at a residence, so. Yeah, so it's entirely possible. We just weren't able to find any evidence in the documentation that we found. Possibly if we found the court records, they might provide some sort of a transcript and we could figure that out. So Frank was also injured. He didn't get away completely scot-free, so he was hospitalized with a fractured skull and some knife bones. He was eventually convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now interestingly, two of the paul bearers for Clarence's funeral were Bob and John Hicks, but we have no idea how they're related to Frank. So I- I presume it was a close family in the neighborhood maybe that they knew and then we move up to Jesse, who is your third-grade grandfather. So this is Clarence's grandfather. He was enlisted with Perkins Battalion. We have another member, Linda, who did a lot of work on his profile and she was actually able to find a book that belonged to him in the early 1800s. In 1971, a Mrs. Walter Johnston purchased an antebellum house on Gabbary Lane in Huntsville, Alabama. In the house she found a small book, The Constitutions of the United States of America, printed in 1825 in Lexington, Kentucky. The book belonged to Jesse Gravitt, Jimmy's third great grandfather. In the book were family birth records, similar to how families would include names in their family bibles. There were also practice ink writings, pencil drawings, and pencil number problems. One of Jesse's children, William, also wrote his school practice in the book. In the back, you can see Jesse's signature, where he identifies the book as his own. This family memento provides a small window into the Gravitt family life from about 1840 to about 1855. We are going to go on to William East. So this is Jesse's father-in-law. Now, when we start researching profiles of people who lived in the Southern States, it is inevitable that we are going to discover slave owners. William East did enslave several people, and when he died, he bequeathed some of them to his children. So we were able to name, define the names of those people who were enslaved, and then we can build their trees out to current times so that people with Black heritage can find their families as well. Betsy Ham. So John's mother, this is John Dudley. His mother was Betsy Ham. And the members of our England project did have a great deal of discovery on the Ham family. They also made an interesting discovery on the Balamee family, where three generations of men who were named Humphrey Balamee married women with the first name of Grace. So again, that was a little bit confusing for some people. But we have here, you can see the excerpt of the tree, Humphrey Balamee, who was the husband of Grace Benner, was the son of Humphrey Balamee, who was the husband of Grace Hex, and he was the son of Humphrey Balamee, who was the husband of Grace Mark. And then we have Thomas Ham, who is your third-grade grandfather. This is Betsy's father. He was born about 1806 in Cornwall, England. His parents were listed as respectable farmers. Now he migrated. He left England and with his wife and his oldest daughter and they came to the United States in 1832 and they settled in Pennsylvania. Now, while they were looking at this Ham family, they were researching all of his siblings as well. It doesn't look like he had any sisters, but he did have seven brothers. So out of the eight, four of them stayed in England. That was William, James, Samuel, and Daniel. Another brother to Thomas had also emigrated to the U.S. and two actually emigrated to Australia. That was Richard and Henry. Frederick or Friedrich Nivenich. He left Germany and settled in Buffalo in 1860 with his wife, Christina, and two children. He had no real estate. He had $50 to his name. It wasn't much going on there, but he grew gradually in prosperity. His occupation was listed as wagon work and repairs. He paid a simple tax of $7.15 in New York in 1864. He was later listed as a wagon heir, a blacksmith, and one who does repairs. By the time the 1870 census comes around, he's still in Buffalo with his wife, but now they have seven children. His real estate is now valued at $2,500 and his personal estate is $500. So they worked really hard to make use of the skills that they had and they settled into Buffalo and lived there. There's still many of the generations. The descendants are still there in Buffalo. It was not all great. Frederick and Christina, out of their seven children, Louis died at the age of 23. He and his brother, John, were out in a boat on the Niagara River over by Strawberry Island, which is just south of Grand Island. And their boat flipped over. They were out with two other friends. So there were four of them in the boat. The boat turned over. Another boat came to help and they were able to pull John out of the water and the two friends, but unfortunately they weren't able to get to Louis and he died. And then Edward and Henry were involved in an absolutely crazy assault in 1895. So Henry and Edward were trying to cross the street. They were on one side of the street. They were going to walk across. As they were starting across the street, they came into contact with three men who were riding bicycles. Now the one of the men who was thrown from this bicycle, he got up off of the ground and he drew a knife and he slashed Edward across the neck. Now Henry gets up and he tries to intervene, but also gets stabbed. He is slashed across the abdomen and all of the newspaper reports that you read from that incident, nobody expected Edward to survive. They actually called it a fatal wound and reported that they expected the coroner to be coming to visit him before the end of the next day. Edward actually did survive this and so did Henry and they both went on to marry and have children. None of our team members can fathom a brick wall and they worked so hard all week to break down who were Frederick's parents and they found them. So now we had researchers in New York researching all of the records that they could find around Buffalo and then we had our other team members who were looking for all of those family names over in Germany and with their collaboration they were able to find all of these Lebanese ancestors. Now these lines reached back into the 1600s. Zula however, like I said before, was already connected into the tree. So her father's lines go back into the 1600s in France for the Garrigan family and the 1600s in Scotland for the McEwen family through Mary McKesson. This tree is showing the pedigree of Zula's grandfather Robert Garrigan. So Zula's mother, we only had her as Nancy. She didn't even have a last name when we started but we found her surname to be Bunch and her parents were Thomas Bunch and Jane Alderdice and this shows, this screen here, shows the pedigree of Jane's mother Mary MacLean which also goes back into the 1600s in Scotland. Now you will notice that there is some duplication so this is what we call pedigree collapse. So Zula's father's McEwen's and her mother's McEwen's were both descended from a couple by the name of George Marshall and Isabella McEwen but they were born in 1740 and they died about 1800. This means that Zula's parents who weren't born until 1850 probably had no idea that they were somehow related but they were actually three cousins. With wiki tree reels we always have these little tools and gadgets and gizmos that we like to play with and this is our connection finder so I put your ID in to the connection finder and try to see who you're related to. So you are third cousin's nine times removed from Thomas Jefferson. And in addition to your blood relationship to our third president you have a 17 degree connection to our first president George Washington, your great great grandfather Thomas Wales. After your great great grandmother Mary Clem passed away in 1881 Martha Stovall Wales is quite closely connected to Elizabeth Washington, a first cousin of George Washington. After this week Jimmy you actually have 24,842,891 family members on wiki tree. Every single one of us all 24 million is connected to all the others through blood or marriage. Our wiki tree team member Aowyn had a chance earlier this week to talk to author AJ Jacobs about his connection to you. This is an interesting connection because AJ is the author of a best-selling book called the know-it-all which was about reading the encyclopedia. He also wrote a book about wiki tree and how we're all related called it's all relative. Let me share with you you can see your connection. Can you see that? But you can see I think you know this but for people who don't every time it changes color that means there was a marriage so really you guys are only connected through two marriages. Nothing. Nothing. Which is kind of cool. Yeah it is amazing and it is just amazing to me that you can do this. Were you able to look up any of these people like uh. I did I was gonna show you um this one Abel Burton he kind of popped out he was um a private during the American Revolution. Awesome. Yeah so he served with the Virginia militia looks like. Thank you for our country. Amazing I mean you guys are amazing it's really something. Thank you. Thank you. This is great so we'll go on wiki tree now and take a look at through all of this. Yeah it's fascinating. And there are links everywhere to sources to newspaper articles to free space pages. Yeah there's there's so much. Great amazing. Wow thank you.