Genealogy of Olivia Newton-John - WikiTree Challenge Highlights

Question

Hello WikiTreers!

WikiTree Challenge 18 for Olivia Newton-John has wrapped up. The collaboration was incredible to watch, and it was a lot of fun learning how to tackle those Welsh & German lines! Team members once again took on the challenge and amazed us with their discoveries.

Challenge participants added 911 family members to her branches! There were 100 direct ancestors added, 186 nuclear relatives of ancestors, and 625 additional relatives within seven degrees! New connections were made to the global tree on five different ancestral lines. This will help a lot of us grow closer together.

Altogether, more than 37 members made 4,578 edits to her family profiles. Many did research, while others worked on profile narratives, looked up articles, added categories, made peripheral connections, and contributed in other ways.

MVP: Guillaume Albasini

Top Bounty Hunters: Guillaume Albasini and Donna Baumann

Team Captain: Karen Lowe

Challenge scoring explanation. Challenge Resources.

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Some highlights from our discoveries:

• Beadon Paul Newton and his wife Joan, Olivia's third great-grandparents, had three children all baptized on the same date (20 February 1837): James, Emma and Julia. Beadon's occupation was butcher, and they appear to have had a close association with the Ralls family who also had children baptized on the day with one having the first name Beadon and another two who had the middle name Newton. 
• Olivia's great-grandfather James Newton (along with a group of landlords and barkeeps) was charged with, and plead guilty to "Selling Adulterated Whisky" in 1889 as landlord of the Torbey Hotel. He was fined 40 shillings or a month imprisonment. Adulterated whiskey is made with inferior ingredients or colored to look like more expensive whiskey.
• Sebastian Eberhard Jhering, Olivia's fifth great grandfather, was a government councilor of the last prince of East Frisia. He planned a navigable waterway, designed an international boundary (now the border between Germany and the Netherlands), created the legal basis for the state's claim to the barren areas and even had a village and a canal named after him. 
• Eberhard Bacmeister, Olivia's sixth great grandfather, became in 1684 the personal physician of young Prince of East Frisia. He accompanied Christian Eberhard von Ostfriesland and his mother the regent princess, on their numerous journeys. In Vienna, Bacmeister succeeded in curing the Prince, who was seriously ill with smallpox.
• Reverend Doctor Martin Luther is Olivia's 12th great grandfather. He  is best known for shaking up the religious world with his "95 Theses", which started the Protestant Reformation.

Comments

A few more interesting finds:

• Frederich Wilhelm von Halem settled in Emden in 1786 as a general practitioner but gave up the lucrative practice, which had still left him time for scientific work, when, at the request of his hometown against the candidates of the king and the crown prince, he was elected state physician of East Frisia by the East Frisian estates in 1797. From then until his death, despite all the political upheavals, he remained the highest medical official in East Frisia, which first belonged to Prussia, then Dutch, French, Prussian again and finally became part of the Kingdom of Hanover in 1815. He also founded in 1794 the first German North Sea spa on the island of Norderney.
• Julia (Newton) Ralls married her nephew, her sister Mary’s son. This is termed an “avunculate” marriage and is illegal in UK; perhaps the reason they moved to Bridgwater.
• Olivia's great great grandaunt, Catherine John was an assisted emigrant to Australia, arriving on the Iberia about 18 Jan 1884 as a third class passenger, with her two young children in tow. The Emigrant and Colonists Aid Corporation granted them 40 acres.
• The actor Jeff Conaway, who played Kenickie alongside Olivia in the movie, "Grease" was married to her sister, Rona, for five years, 1980-1985.
• Jeff Conaway had a great uncle whose death in 1905 made it into the St. Louis newspaper. He checked into a hotel at 4 am with a woman. He was drunk. Their bodies were found around noon, victims of gas asphyxiation. There was supposed to be a Conaway family reunion on that day.

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"New connections were made to the global tree on five different ancestral lines."

Is there a WikiTree tool to allow these different connections to be identified?

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Good question, Stephen. We use the scoresheet, where a report has been added for us called "Connections." This will show you all of the connections on the eight lines of great-grandparents.

Answer 1

Thanks Mindy,

so this is a completely manual method, and thus could be quickly out-of-date.It is another thing which I would love to have as an automated tool. Perhaps something to add to the wish list for the Hackerthon project?

Regards Steve

Comments

What would you like to see automated, Stephen?

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In the comment section above, you said:

 "We use the scoresheet, where a report has been added for us called "Connections." This will show you all of the connections on the eight lines of great-grandparents."

I interpreted this as meaning that you had to manually put together a spreadsheet for each guest. Perhaps I was wrong, but could a 'spreadsheet' be automatically assembled for 'anyone'?

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I'm sorry that wasn't made clearer, Stephen. The scoresheet serves several functions. Here you can find the links to the connections to the global tree, as well as the distances of all challenge participants to the focus for that week.