Genealogy of Mariah Carey - WikiTree Challenge Highlights

Question

Hello WikiTreers!

WikiTree Challenge #24, the last of 2022, is now complete. It was an incredible week spent collaborating and building up an impressive amount of relatives! A few branches were hacked off or changed at one point, and this week's numbers were still at the top of the chart! We were able to add quite a few African American profiles on her father's side, but even more of the Irish profiles on her mother's side (all of those older ancestors were Irish). We were hoping to expand her Venezuelan line, but the names were too common to find definitive records. 

Challenge participants added a total of 1,447 family members to her branches. There were 20 direct ancestors added, 79 nuclear relatives of ancestors, and 1,348 additional relatives within seven degrees! Connections to the global tree were made on two of the eight great-grandparents' lines. This made researchers up to ten degrees closer to Mariah! They did such an outstanding job that Mariah's connections at seven degrees (CC7) now stand at an incredible 1,665.

Altogether more than 30 WikiTreers made 6,122 edits to her family profiles. Many did research, while others worked on profile narratives, looked up articles, added categories, made peripheral connections, translated documents, and contributed in other ways.

MVP: Emma MacBeath

Top Bounty Hunter: Homer Thiel

Team Captain: Cheryl Hess

All contributors ● Scoring explanation ● Research resources

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Here are some highlights from our discoveries:

• Mariah's second great grandparents, John Hickey and Ellen Hickey, donated the stained glass windows when St. Patrick's Church was being built in Lincoln, Logan County, Illinois. It was a Catholic church founded by Irish immigrants in 1905.
• Mariah's second great grandmother Eliza (Taylor)(McQueen) Reynolds was the mother of 19 children between 1869 and 1898.
• John Henry Burns, Mariah's great grandmother's nephew, was a noted civil rights leader in Detroit. He helped organize the 1963 Walk to Freedom in that city, which drew 125,000 marchers.
• James Thomas Hickey, Mariah's 4th cousin, was a Staff Sergeant in the Army Air Corps' 3rd Photo Mapping Squadron. They were tasked with doing aerial photography and creating maps as part of the war effort. After the war he became one of the country's leading experts on Abraham Lincoln and was curator of the Lincoln Collection for the Illinois Historical Library in Springfield.
• Headman Blanco lived to be 107. Nick is the second great grandnephew of Headman.

Comments

More interesting discoveries:

• Jeremiah Ray (1848-), a cousin on the Carey line, had fifteen children, which included a set of fraternal twins. Only ten of the children were living in 1900.
• Hiram O'Bryan (1835-bef.1877), seven degrees from Mariah out on the Egan/Holdreith line, had eight children. This included two sets of twins.
• Mariah's second cousin, Virginia M. Brosamer, served in the United States Navy during World War II as a WAVE, as a Storekeeper 3rd Class. After the war she would become Vice-President of the World Book Encyclopedia Company.
• William Bernard Convery, another of Mariah's second cousins, worked as a linotype operator for the Illinois State Register newspaper. A linotype operator used a 90-character keyboard to assemble blocks of text that were then cast into slugs which were used to print newspapers. This was a much faster method than to hand-set type.
• Esau Cannon (1914-2001), Nick Cannon's great grandfather, had a twin brother named Jacob, like the Biblical twins with the same names.
• Nick's second great granduncle Headman Blanco lived to be 107.

Answer 1

Great finds, everyone!

Comments

This was just so much fun, Steven! I hope you and yours are inside and warm.

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Winter is here and I again have time for wikitree. I would love to work on the next challenge, please let me know when it begins.

Answer 2

US Black Heritage Project got a two for one this week since the challenge team also worked on Mariah's ex-husband Nick Cannon's tree. We added hundreds of new profiles with Black heritage and since they are connected to the Tree, any new profiles added to these families will also be connected. Win, win, win!

Comments

That's awesome! Thank you, Emma and USBH!

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Thanks again for joining us, Emma! What an incredibly fun week!

Answer 3

A great week of collaboration and community effort! A huge thank you to the Italy Project - Frank Santoro and Tara Bongiovanni for all the research done to get us from New York to Basilicata, Campania, Molise, and Sicily! 

Comments

Thank you Azure, Frank, and Tara!! Your help was truly appreciated!

Answer 4

   her mom Patricia nee hickey a former opera singer and a vocal coach of irish descent 

father alfred roy carey is an aeronautical engineer of african american and black venezuelan-american lineage the last name of carey was adopted by her venezuelan grandfather francisco Nunez after he emigrated to New york.

patricia family disowned her for married a black man