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Robert Finley was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1772 to James Finley and his wife Ann Angrest. His father, James Finley, was born 1737 in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was trained as a yarn merchant and where he became acquainted with Rev John Witherspoon, then a pastor in the town of Paisley about six miles from Glasgow. His father immigrated from Scotland to New Jersey in 1769. His paternal grandparents were James Finley from Paisley, and Ann McDonald Finley.
He married Ester Flynt Caldwell on 16 May 1798. They had 9 children.
Robert Finley and Samuel John Mills, both clergymen, helped organize the American Colonization Society at Washington, D.C. in 1816 and 1817, which was intended to establish a colony in West Africa as a destination for free American blacks. [1]
In 1817, Finley fell ill while traveling to assume his new position as president of the University of Georgia. He died three months after arriving. He was buried in Jackson Street Cemetery on the school's north campus in Athens, Georgia.
Featured German connections: Robert is 20 degrees from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 22 degrees from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 20 degrees from Lucas Cranach, 18 degrees from Stefanie Graf, 19 degrees from Wilhelm Grimm, 21 degrees from Fanny Hensel, 24 degrees from Theodor Heuss, 14 degrees from Alexander Mack, 30 degrees from Carl Miele, 16 degrees from Nathan Rothschild, 19 degrees from Hermann Friedrich Albert von Ihering and 19 degrees from Ferdinand von Zeppelin on our single family tree. Login to see how you relate to 33 million family members.