New content on this site

• August, 2023 - We have finally come to a conclusion in our search for the identity and destiny of the boy named "C. Finkelman, Jr." who was enumerated, along with his brothers, August and Louis Finkelman, on the 1860 Federal Census of Harris County, Texas. Read about it here, in Charles Finkelman, Jr..

• June, 2023 - At last we have found the death date for August Fingleman's wife, Florence Patience Green. We located a newspaper clipping from The Liberty Vindicator dated December 19, 1902 stating that she died on December 14, 1902, and was buried in Linney Cemetery in Dayton.

• June, 2023 - We have located two letters written by Stephen Green, first-born son of Reason Green, to the editors of The Galveston News in 1895. Stephen sheds a little more light on the Green family saga in these letters. You can see them here.

• September, 2021 - Jennifer has been busy. She has added about 1,000 individuals, updated many birth, marriage and death dates, and added a lot of sources to the family tree.

• September, 2020 - The "Contact Us" page on this site has been a non-functioning place-holder since we moved the site from Mindspring.com to our own server earlier this year. It is now functioning again - click on the Contact Us link in the left navigation menu, and send us a message!

• September, 2020 - you can now quickly search the family tree data for a name. If you find the person you are looking for, you can then go directly to that person's page in the combined family trees. Click Family Tree Search in the left navigation menu and give it a try!

• September, 2020 - a new database is online at Ancestry.com, containing images of draft cards from the World War II era. All men in the US who were 18 to 65 years of age between 1940 and 1946 were required to register for the draft, although only those men under 45 years of age were subject to conscription. We have extracted the draft cards for some men in our family trees, and you can view them by clicking on the WW II Draft Cards link in the left navigation menu.

• August, 2020 - we have found a new resource for Texas history that contains a lot of information valuable to family history buffs. The website is called The Portal to Texas History, and it contains a large amount of information, much of it in the form of newspaper articles dating back to the early 19th century, before the Texas Revolution.

  Stay tuned ...

• April, 2020 - this website began and for many years was hosted on Mindspring.com. In 1999, Mindspring merged with Earthlink, and Mindspring's customers noticed no significant changes in their service at first. But as time went on, it became apparent that Earthlink was not up to the task of providing the same cutting edge services that Mindspring customers had become accustomed to. Years ago our ability to make changes on this website became unreliable, and last year we lost that ability completeley.Finally, late last year Earthlink announced that all of the websites on the Mindspring.com domain would go away in 2020. Now it has happened.

  I began late last year rebuilding this website on our personal webserver, and if you are reading this, you have found it. Please pass on the new URL.

• October, 2014 - We are in the process of moving the family photo galleries from PBase to our own server. Among other things, this will give you the ability to send us your family photos so that we can add them to the galleries.

  The links on the various family pages will be updated to the new galleries as the photos are moved. We have also added a link to "Our Photos" near the bottom of the left navigation menu.

• December, 2013 - We have added a new section to the site containing family recipes we have collected over the years. Click on the Family Recipes link in the left navigation menu to browse the recipe categories. If you're related, feel free to send us your favorite recipes, and we will add them to the collection.

• January, 2013 - We upgraded our web server again, this time with a new, dedicated Linux PC. More disk space, more memory, faster network ...

• April, 2012 - Time flies ... it's been almost three years since we posted here. Jennifer's been very busy, but mostly with OPG (Other People's Genealogy). It's about time we got involved with our own genealogy and with this site again.

  Almost five years ago we announced here that we had turned on our own webserver to host the combined family trees, and that if all went well we would be moving all the individual family trees to it as well. That was completed years ago, and that webserver was still going strong until yesterday. It was an old, unwanted PC, salvaged from a trash pile - Don put Linux on it and set it up as a webserver, and it has been going ever since. Last night, Don replaced it with another, not quite as old, unwanted PC, with a new version of Linux - not because it was necessary, just because...

• May, 2009 - A relative came across a marriage certificate for one of the couples in our family tree and sent us a copy. It can be quite remarkable to discover how a single reliable document can lead to more information and result in expanding the tree and improving its accuracy. Read about it in Pursuing the (Digital) Paper Trail.

• February, 2008 - Our family trees have grown now to include more than 10,000 people. Many of the additions have been in the Cornett family line. We have also added many names to our Cronea and Bellar descendants, and we have published a page containing additional links to documents related to Charles Cronea.

  One of the most exciting aspects for us is the feedback we get from relatives who find this web site. Recently a descendant of Louis Finkelman contacted us and provided additional information about Louis and his descendants. The stories passed down in the Fingleman family about August's arrival in the US as a child orphaned by a ship wreck off of Galveston and accompanied by a younger brother are echoed in the Finkelman family as well, the younger brother being their ancestor Louis Finkelman.

• July, 2007 - One year ago we proudly announced that we had obtained additional server space and were able to publish our "Combined Family Tree" for the first time. Well, Jennifer has been very busy since then - she has added about 1,500 new people to our family trees, and she has added source documentation to many of the people we already had in our trees. The result of all of her diligent, thorough work is that our published family tree information is more meaningful, accurate and reliable than ever. But it also means that we ran out of server space again!

  This month we turned on our own webserver just to hold the Combined Family Trees. If this works out well we will start moving the individual descendant charts, whose links are seen on each family's page shown on the left, to our own webserver as well. For now, the latest and greatest information we have will be found on the "Combined Family Trees" link above. The pages are indexed, so you can find anyone we have in our database, including ancestors of spouses and such, not just descendants of the people at the top of our family trees.

  If we are able to move all of the descendant charts to our own webserver, we will be able to update those much more frequently.

• June, 2007 - Club Photo, the photo hosting website we have used for several years to display the various family photo albums linked from this website, has gone out of business. We have signed up with another service (PBase) and are working to rebuild the albums on their servers. The links to photo albums on our various family pages will point to the new PBase albums as we get them rebuilt.

  With respect for ever increasing concerns about privacy and identity protection, we will not be posting any identifiable photos of living people where the photos are less than fifty years old.

• May, 2007 - It's past due - for years we have been certain of the link between Don's great-grandfather August Fingleman and the family of Louis Finkelman, long-time Houston residents. Last year we obtained the compelling evidence to cinch the case - August's obituary, published in 1922, listing Louis as his surviving brother.

  We had already done much of the leg work involved in documenting the Finkelman family, and now we are publishing it. You will find a link on this site's Fingleman / Lloyd / Green page to "Genealogy Report on the descendants of Charles Finkelman", or you can click here for a short-cut. This new link replaces the previous link to "Descendants of August Fingleman".

• July, 2006 - Our search for more information about Don's great-grandfather, August Fingleman, who immigrated to the United States in 1857 and married Florence Green of Louisiana in about 1873, has proved difficult. Recently we verified that August had a brother named Louis Finkelman, who lived in Houston. We have found evidence that strongly suggests August and Louis lived in Houston as early as 1860 in the home of relatives, perhaps an aunt and grandfather. Further newly discovered documents cite a shipwreck off of Galveston, Texas in 1857 that may have taken the lives of August and Louis' mother and father. Read about it here in The Finkelman Connection.

• July, 2006 - We recently obtained more server space, and have published a new family tree that we have wanted to do for a long time. It contains ALL of the people in our family file, in one tree. The Table of Contents contains links to the people at the top of each major branch of our family tree. Each individual is presented on a separate page, with notes and source information on the same page. There are also links to the individuals' ancestors, spouses, and children on each page. Navigation links at the top and bottom of each page will take you to those lists, to the table of contents and to alphabetical name and surname lists. The "Home" link brings you back to this site's home page, and the "Contact Us" link brings you to the contact page on this site.

  We have added a couple hundred new people to the tree, many of them in the Dunman and Martin lines, and many new source citations. Have a look, and use the Contact Us link to let us know what you think. Soon we will be replacing the Family Tree Maker links on the various family pages of this site with links to these new pages.

• February, 2005 - We have added a section containing images of World War I Civilian Draft Registration cards for some of the men in our family tree. These cards were required by law to be completed by all men in the United States who were between 18 and 46 years of age on September 12, 1918, and who were not already in military service. The applicants were registered in three phases, beginning in June, 1917. There is a link to this new section in the left navigation menu.

• October, 2004 - At long last, we have discovered the identity of Florence Green's mother, the wife of John L. Green. There are those who say her name was Adeline, and there are those who say her name was Aurelia. They are all right - Mrs. John L. Green was born Aurelia Adeline Land, daughter of Benajah and Patience Land, in Catahoula Parish, LA. Read here how we put the clues together to come up with her identity, and locate her parents and sisters at the same time.

• March, 2004 - We found an 1860 census record from Itawamba County, Mississippi showing Don's great-great grandfather Samuel Thomas Means living with his wife Elizabeth Augusta Leslie Means and three of their children. Don's great-grandfather Willis Patton Means was not born until five years after this census. The children in this record are Mary (Mollie), Laura and Susan (Sudie). Samuel's step brother William Fergus Means is also enumerated in the household. Here's a link to an image of that record.

  We also found Elizabeth's father and mother, Samuel and Mary Leslie, living nearby with seven of their children.

• October, 2003 - We discovered a link between Jennifer's Dunman ancestors and Don's Green ancestors. Samuel L. Green, brother of Don's great-grandmother Florence Green, married Elizabeth Dunman, neice of Jennifer's great-great-great grandfather Martin Dunman, in 1883 in Bee County, Texas. Thanks to Dorothy Smith for this information. Dorothy descends from Samuel and Elizabeth's daughter Susan.

  The Green's and the Dunman's were both pioneer families in southeast Texas, and we have seen other evidence that they were neighbors in Liberty County. Here's a link to a page from the 1900 Goliad County, Texas census showing Samuel, Elizabeth and their six children.