Jovan Hutton Pulitzer profile CONSPICUOUS in its absence

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Excellent subject for discussion, Cheley. (Though he may be here privately since he is living.)

https://www.amazon.com/Ancestors-Jovan-Hutton-Pulitzer-Vol/dp/13878...

"Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (aka Jeffry Jovan Philyaw)" -- I guess he's one of those people who change their names? "Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (birth name Jeffry Jovan Philyaw)".

https://www.genealogyblog.com/?p=33869

John Robert Philyaw of NC had 15 children with his second wife.

I did find numerous private listings for both, Philyaw and Pulitzer.

https://www.geni.com/search?names=pulitzer&page=19&search_a...

https://www.geni.com/search?search_type=people&names=philyaw

He’s not on Geni, and there’s no point in making a profile without names of parents & grandparents. I don’t think there’s a current Wikipedia page for him either.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2206344/bio Is not revealing either.

:)

There's a book called The Oak Island Encyclopedia that says, on p. 190, that:

Born Jeffry Jovan Philyaw, Pulitzer was introduced to the entertainment industry at a young age. His father, a carpenter by trade, was the head ranch manager for the Lyndon B. Johnson Ranch, located in the hill country of Central Texas. ... Pulitzer was further exposed to the entertainment industry through his mother, an actress who played minor roles in Roman Polanski's 1968 psychological horror film Rosemary's Baby and Clint Eastwood's 1971 psychological thriller Play Misty for Me.

Now, three immediate problems: there are absolutely zero citations for this info, the book is self-published, and the book has no official connection to the Oak Island show. So we don't have a lot of reasons to trust what it has to say. But, I figured we could try to explore these clues anyway to see if they would lead us anywhere. They didn't.

I can find no connections between anyone named Philyaw and the LBJ Ranch. Per the New York Times and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the ranch foreman was a man named Vernon Dale Malechek, who went by his middle name. So there could definitely have been a Philyaw staffer of some kind there -- we can't prove it either way -- but it seems like he wouldn't have been the ranch manager, and if he existed, he wasn't notable enough to make it into any official records or newspaper reports.

The full cast and crew, including minor roles, for the two movies his mother is said to have acted in are available through IMDb -- here's Rosemary's Baby and here's Play Misty for Me. There is no female actor who appears on both lists.

But! I wasn't ready to give up quite yet...so I checked into that self-published genealogy Debra found on Amazon, and there's a preview feature where you can see one of the charts in the book. Give this page a few seconds to load the pop-up, then scroll down to the fourth preview page. There, it says that Jeffry Jovan Philyaw is a son of Robert Earl Philyaw, b. 8 September 1933 in Proctor, Crittenden County, Arkansas and Silvia Christa Ploeger b. 18 February 1943 in Giessen Hess, Federal Republic of Germany and d. 11 November 2002 in Carmel, Monterey County, California.

And yet...you guessed it, no sources that we can see in this preview. In addition, there seem to be some sloppy errors immediately apparent in the tree, including saying that Silvia's paternal grandmother died both in the Łódź ghetto and in a concentration camp. It looks like the author is churning out books every three weeks, so I'm not sure how great the quality of the book would be. Frankly, it looks like they're just publishing Family Tree Maker exports with no citations.

But since it's the best lead you've got, I would try to find a connection between Jeffry Jovan Philyaw and either Robert Earl Philyaw or Silvia Christa Ploeger. Maybe you can work from that angle. But I wouldn't add anything to the tree unless you can firm it up.

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