Connection Combat: Tesla Toss-up. Nikola Tesla vs. Elon Musk

Question

Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system. Einstein, when asked once what it was like to be the smartest man alive, replied, "I don't know, you'll have to ask Nikola Tesla."

Elon Musk is the current CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors.  

On your mark, get set, GO!

Nikola Tesla

vs.

Elon Musk

The rules and guidelines are here, and post in this thread once you've made a connection so we can declare a winner! 

Remember, the goal is to connect one of these individuals to the previous month's winner - J.K. Rowling.

If you need to be added to one of the Trusted Lists, let me know and I will add you.

The winning profile will be featured as one of our Special Connections (like AJ Jacobs and Kevin Bacon) so members can have a chance to see how they are connected.

Comments

Wow! Awesome work everyone! I really thought this one was going to take some time.  Very Impressed.  Thank you all.

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Wow - what a long meandering path that was for Telsa's connection! 40 Degrees to AJ, 40 Degrees of Bacon, and 61 Degrees of Rowling. And one cool part was that there were still a few more lines to explore that might have borne other connections.

Regardless, I'm looking at Musk now - Gratz to Lucy, who was successful in finding the link!

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Can I get someone to open Musk-16 for me? Thanks!

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Yea, this was a prime example of "going sideways" to find a connection! I'm going to flesh out the tree a bit (until a new obsession takes me...) so a less convoluted path might show itself.

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It looks like Connection Finder has quit showing connections to J.K. Rowling. Profiles still advertise connections, but if you run a connection from a persons who is more than ~10 steps from her, you come up with nothing!

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My guess would be Chris is in the middle of changing it from Rowling to Tesla.

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In spite of the problems you found with the connection from Rowling to Tesla?

Answer 1

Ooo..Bonus points for creating Tesla's parents in Cyrillic!

Ooo...Ooo... and bonus points for Creating Elon in Canadian, Eh?

Comments

Ha! Funny.

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And you got me curious... I tried. Nikola and his father have some sort of Cyrillic characters in their names now. Since I don't read Cyrillic, someone would have to proofread it to tell me if it's right!

Answer 2

Started some work on Nikola - added his father. Updated Nikola with his cyrillic name. Added some sources. Noted that he was never married and never had children, so the best bet for a link will be through his sisters. His tree runs something like:

Nikola Tesla

Parents

Milutin Tesla - 1819-1879

Duka Mandic 1822-1892

Siblings

Dane Tesla 1849-1861

Angelina (Tesla) Trbojevich 1851-?

Milka Tesla 1853-?

Marcia Tesla 1858-?

Grandparents

Nikola Tesla 1780-?

Ana Kalinic 1781-?

Nikola Mandic 1797-?

Soda Budisavljevic 1800-?

Based on some of the family search data (which is always questionable, but at least it's a starting place...)

https://familysearch.org/tree/#view=ancestor&person=LCZQ-QDQ

 

Comments

Fascinating... if I can decipher the cyrillic on this image of Tesla's family tree, that could help... it does appear that certain branches on his family tree are prolific in nature...

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/9241/n2l.gif

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Nice find, I'm having a go at deciphering too. I'll keep you posted if i make any progress but since I have no knowledge of Cyrillic alphabets its likely to be slow going!

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Ok, Here's my best attempt so far.

Blue are names I'm sure about.

Red are ones I sounded out like a preschooler and are probably at least similar to the persons name.

I'll try and finish it off later but my brain hurts now!

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You guys are awesome!

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Wow. That was incredible! Great job, Lucy!!

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Nice work, Lucy!

Answer 3

Elon Musk's great-grandfather's profile is private, for no obvious good reasons: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Haldeman-70

(I think I might have somehow caused that, when I accidentally connected that profile to the wrong relative.)
It would be helpful for it to be opened up.

Comments

Thanks, it's open now!

Answer 4

Musk's great grandmother with her 2nd husband Hesseltine Wilson

Not too helpful.

 

Comments

Hesseltine Wilson's family

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This is an interesting article on Elon Musk's great-grandmother "Almeda Jane Norman".
http://www.canadianchiropractor.ca/leadership/canadas-first-chiropractor-937

As a Canadian with Wilson relatives, I am rooting for Elon and half-hoping I'd notice a relative.. but no such luck.

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This Bentley Family Tree has 75,000 names in it.  One of them is this guy

Tom Wentworth-Fitzwilliam

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Fitzwilliam 

Ancestry's tree display is unusable on my tablet, so I'm out, but if anybody can figure out how Bentley connects Hesseltine Wilson to the Earl, they could be all but done.

 

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Here's a barebones profile for Heseltine Wilson if anyone wants to work on him.

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Excellent, thanks guys!

Answer 5

Ok, I've going to work on Tesla's nephew Nikola Trbojevich. He moved to Detroit so we might find a connection through his wife.

Comments

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/DeVilbiss-219, 

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Lockard-11

These two have been updated as well.

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And THANKS Ellen!! - I was a bit stumped on the first Ely marriage. I suspect the second Ely marriage (Pleasance Ely) might be a similar situation as well.

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The connection via Pleasance Ely is unlikely to work out nearly so well. The documentation on the children of Richard Ely and Joane Phipps Ely in The Ely Ancestry looks fairly solid (but of course looks can deceive!) and there is no mention of a daughter named Pleasance. Additionally, it's highly unlikely that she could have been born in Maryland in 1661 to a mother who died in Plymouth, England, in 1660 and a widowed father who emigrated to New England between 1660 and 1663.

Additionally, Pleasance's profile contains no indication of the basis for connecting her to those parents.

Several hours later: I'm going to disconnect Pleasance Ely from the supposed parents. I searched for her name Ancestry.com, with no dates or other details. The hits included a lot of useless junk, some SAR applications that listed her as a pre-Revolutionary ancestor (with no details), and some personal webpages about her, focused largely on debunking the bad information, propagated on the Internet, that she was a daughter of Richard Ely and Joane Phipps. The best of these was http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paxson/southern/ely-dorsey.html .

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Well, without the full connection check running, I'm speculating, but presuming that the profile that needs the connection is Dorsey-257 and not Ely-68, we might be OK. Edward Dorsey's mom's name is definitely Pleasance (see will information in his father's profile), but her maiden name is not clear. I'd agree, it becomes doubtful that it is Ely, as there is some questionable heritage stuff there. But I'd need to see the whole chain to determine where the questionable profiles exist.

BTW - I cleaned up a few more of those with missing sources. Just a couple more to go. The DeVilbiss and Lockard's are done. Need to fix the Wareheims and Wolf and I think we'll be good with sources.

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The connection to J.K. Rowling depended on a connection to William Brewster (who is a critical link for the connection between J.K. Rowling and Al Jacobs, and who appears in pretty much everyone else's connection trail to Rowling).

Because Moses Noyes is just 4 steps from William Brewster,  the marriage of Mary Ely to Moses Noyes and the supposed marriage of an Ely to a Dorsey were important shortcuts on the trail from Dorsey to Rowling.

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Rats. Since Pleasance Dorsey's maiden name is in question, it becomes important to determine how that may impact the connection. I suspect there will still be a connection, but it will take another route.

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I'm sure there's another connection besides the one through Dorsey, Ely, and Noyes, but the path is likely to be much longer.

As for Pleasance, it's not her maiden name that's in question so much as it is the identity of her parents. She can be named Ely without having that particular pair of parents. That family in Lyme, Connecticut, was hardly the only Ely family in the world at the time of her birth.

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Woo - 61 Degrees from Rowling now - same as before, but a slightly different path with Ely out of the picture.

Alls well that ends well.

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Cool that things worked out like that!

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Oh, no! Does this mean I will never be able to trace my Austro- Hungarian lines into the 1800s? Bummer! Are Slovakian lines difficult to trace too?Thanks!Sharon

Answer 6

I created profiles for two of Elon Musk's 3G grandparents: Thomas Norman and Ann Harker Norman, who were born in England and emigrated to America.  I found a self-published book about a branch of the Norman family in Elon Musk's ancestral line: https://books.google.com/books?id=YrblcQY9jnMC (previewable at Google Books). The book doesn't look like a solid source, but there's a lot of information in it that could be helpful in tracking down records for some members of the Norman family.

According to that book, Thomas Norman and Ann Harker were from Yorkshire -- do we have any experts on those surnames in Yorkshire?

Comments

Thomas and Ann married in Stokesley, North Yorkshire, in 1823. She was "of Stokesley" and he was "of Helmsley."  I've looked for birth records, and found some candidates, but no records that cause me to say "Bingo! That's the person!".