Welcome to our Family Tree Website

This site is a presentation of and a community site for our branches of the Forster, Hummer, Sassen, and Ulliman family lines. Most of the information here has been assembled by Teresa Ann Forster from various sources over the past decade or so. I am her son Carl E Forster and I run this website from home in Lake Elsinore, California.  The site is housed at my home, on a computer in my garage, instead of a web hosting service. This allows complete control over what is presented here. The added benefit is its not too expensive.  :>)

The information on the descendants pages is derived from the Family Tree Maker files that Teresa maintains. She maintains 4 separate files for the 4 last names the site is dedicated to. A genealogy report was generated from the 4 oldest known ancestors of each line and then transferred here. We would really like to expand on what we have.  In particular the Forster line needs more. A lot of early info is pretty incomplete. ANY help on that would be appreciated greatly.

There are 2 sections of reports. One section comes from the individual Family files.  Teresa has 4 separate files she has been working on for some years and the "single Family Narratives come from those separate files.  The "combined Family narratives" came from merging all 4 of those files into a single file. The combined file has considerably more information in them because all of the people from the 4 family's are in it. Also notes that pertained to specific individuals that were in one file but not the others were merged so that is why there are big differences in that aspect.

To make the pages a bit easier to read I "cleaned up" the text by removing the references and numbering in the original report. Things like 1. iii Name (name1)(name2) and so forth. There will be a link on each page where you can download the original untouched files in several formats if you so desire. These will have all that information intact.

There is another section of pages that were created using a program called The Complete Genealogy Reporter.  This program uses a gedcom file to create reports of all kinds.  One kind is web folders with frames.  You can pick any individual in the tree and create these web pages automatically.  They are extensively hyperlinked and detailed.  One of the cool features about them (to me anyway) is that all the family relations are from the perspective of the person the report is created from.  That means aunts, cousins, once, twice removed and so on pertain to the "top" individual.  I have included the same 4 ancestors as the main pages, me and Teresa.  Upon request I can add anybody's name to the web site, so if you would like a report please feel free to let me know.  It only takes a couple minutes to add a name and a link so by all means ask.  There is no limit to how many names can be added to the site.

Check out the photo gallery page too. We put up the photo's that were merged into the family tree files and I made a "lightbox" style photo gallery page for them. I would really like to expand that also so please feel free to send me some pics to add to it. The page was created by a free program called Visual Lightbox. Cool stuff!

There is also forum section where you can discuss and share information too. One of our hopes are to get more and more people involved and helping expand our information. Because of all the crazy's out there I have set the board registration where I have to manually approve each persons registration.  Spammers like to post all kinds of crap on message boards like these so to prevent that I need to approve registrations.  When you register to the forums I will get an email and from that I can approve you.  If you would be so kind, please pick a username that is easy to "define". I get at least 8 or 10 people a day trying to register with nonsense names and email addresses so they can spam the message boards with crap ads for generic viagra or whatever.  Almost all of these come from eastern Europe or China. Sorry about the inconvenience getting registered but in the long run it helps a lot.  You can post just about any thing you want on the boards as long as we keep it nice and clean. This is a family site after all. :>)

If there is anybody who would like to help with this site, be it with design, writing or contributing in any way I could sure use the help. I'm not much of an author or graphics design kid of guy. Most of what you see here comes from predesigned templates and such. I am more of a nuts and bolts type. I like the backend stuff like the computers and software that makes it all work. I could use some artistic guidance. Any interested folks out there please contact me.

I hope you enjoy your visit here. Don't forget to spread the word to your family members too.