Main Page

It was in 1968, after a coordination meeting in the Pentagon, that a young Major fell into stride with me and mentioned that he had noted the unusual spelling of my last name. He said that he had run across it before, and that his mother had some books in her attic that had the Cleaveland name on them. We had a casual conversation about the difficulties anyone has with an oddly spelled name, and then went our separate ways in the bowels of the largest office building in the world. A few weeks later I was surprised to find a set of books delivered to me. Jonathan's mother, Marianne Bulkley, had sent them to me with her best wishes, as she had several sets inherited from the author, Jonathan's great-grandfather Edmond Janes Cleveland. The books had been published in 1899, and comprised a three volume genealogy of the Cleveland and Cleaveland families. My dad located his grandfather George in the listings, and we had some small pleasure scanning the family history, but I gave no serious thought to modernizing the information until I built my first personal computer.

One thing led to another, and before long I was in the process of entering the data I had into a data base. Then when I retired from Government work I started more actively updating the family history by expanding "downward" from George. Along the way I discovered that Mrs. Evelyn (Pease) Sawyer was working on the Pease family history, and Dad's mother was naturally included within the scope of her work, so we started exchanging information.

All along I've continued to treat this as a hobby, with no promises to anyone about the final product. I'm clearly not interested in republishing the original 1899 genealogy with revision - it's simply too massive an undertaking for my energies and pocketbook; there are about 3000 pages of small type listings in those volumes. So I've generally stuck to the idea of working on the ancestry of my grandchildren and that of my wife's family, collecting and recording data as it becomes available and with only a modicum of what a professional genealogist would properly call research. There is a page dealing with the surname CLEVELAND/CLEAVELAND, and it's origins. As those of us with the surname CLEAVELAND will attest, it is a never ending battle to get people to spell our name "right", and my searching back through records of the family shows that it was true since the original spelling divergence occurred, which I gather was about the time of Moses Cleveland's immigration to the New World. In many cases I have been forced to choose between the two spellings when there was no preponderance of evidence one way or the other. In those cases I have leaned towards using the spelling as it appears on the "latest" invocation; frequently the gravestone inscription, obituary, etc. I have occasionally included notes about the various sources of variant spellings for an individual.

Some apologies are in order:

I have tried to be complete about recording ancestors of those in my family and Barbara's. If I had data, I included it, and occasionally did some research. I have been tempted to include some descendants of those ancestors who might be either especially notable (such as Presidents of the United States) or who seem to be close enough that it would be interesting for some other reason. I sometimes yielded to that temptation, and other times did not. There will be cases where I have the information, for example, that a third cousin has a spouse and children, and I simply haven't included them in the data base. If anyone is offended by such an omission, please let me know and, if I still have the resources (personal energy not negligible) I'll be happy to rectify the situation. Or, better yet, I'll help get them started using their own personal computers to carry on the work.

I remember my elders, when I was a youngster, asking me if I believed everything I read; the admonition, of course was obvious. Nonetheless it came as a surprise to me that genealogists have to be constantly on the alert for self serving material in the sources they use. The true genealogist carefully reviews original source documentation before incorporating it in his or her own product. I have generally taken a different tack; I freely copy information I acquire, and refer the reader to the sources. Where "facts" I have drafted have been challenged I have either resolved the issue or taken the easy way out - deleted them entirely. It's the easy way because it avoids what might otherwise become unnecessary family squabbles (or, possibly, scandals). If the source of my information is not obvious (some of the output formats don't easily lend themselves to it) then I welcome inquiries and inspection of my "library". It is worth especially mentioning that some of the sources came from a site "Ancestry - World Family Tree." This data is an amalgamation of data collected from various sources, many of which might themselves be poorly sourced. Those items I have used were selected on the basis of frequency of citation. These were used only in the absence of "real" sources.

A special note is in order relative to the Japanese relatives of Charles Pedersen; at the time of this printing it is known that there are some errors in the relationships but corrections have not yet been received.

The pursuit is never ending. More people are born, people get married, they divorce, and they die. New information becomes available, or new resources make it possible to incorporate information previously neglected. The genealogist is never really finished.

Several of the references for both information and proofs are to sites or pages of sites on the World Wide Web - the internet. These references were inserted as they were encountered, with no special effort to review their currency at any particular time. The nature of the internet is fairly fluid, so that inevitably many - if not all - of the references will be obsolete when the reader encounters them. For that I can only apologize on behalf of those who work tirelessly to improve the internet regardless of the effect such improvements might have on applications such as this.