Grover Cleveland and Me

Once again WikiTree takes me back into my  Pease family in Martha’s Vineyard.  I’ve written about them as I explored my connection to four Presidents earlier in this series:  (Van Buren, Fillmore, Grant, and Arthur), so I’m pretty familiar with them by now.   I’m familiar with these names back to Martha Marchant (#7), who was my paternal 5^th great-grandfather.  Her brother John (#8) was already on my tree as well, and it didn’t take long to find that he had married Miriam Cleveland (#9).  I did discover, however, that I have some incorrect information about John Marchant’s family; it doesn’t matter for this essay, because it doesn’t mess up his marriage to Miriam Cleveland.  I’ll need to come back and clean that up to make sure my direct line is correct.

It didn’t take me long to connect the long line of Clevelands to President Grover Cleveland.

But before we go on, I want to tell you a little about Cleveland’s private life.  He did not marry until he was in the White House; in 1886, at the age of 49, he married the 21-year-old Frances Folsom.  He is the only president who was married in the White House while he was president.  They had five children and were apparently happy.  However, he had claimed paternity of a child born in Buffalo in 1874 to a woman named Maria Halpin.

This Geni connection is not worth pursuing, as I already see an error in the second line.  I talked about this in my essay on President Rutherford B. Hayes a few weeks ago, so I won’t go into it in detail here.  Suffice it to say that Hannah Workman (born Hannah Burgess) on the second line is incorrectly linked to a Burgess family in Massachusetts.  It’s always possible, but I’ve never seen any evidence that connects her to this family.  Without this connection, the link disappears.

This Geni connection doesn’t fall apart immediately, so I began to look into it more carefully.  I recognize this line back through Jefferson Hunt (on the second line), as I wrote about this family in my essays on Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom connect to me through this line.

Jefferson Hunt (my fourth great-uncle) had a son named Marshall, whose daughter Charlotte married Edwin Dustin.  They had a son named Burton, who married Sarah Eliza Burnham.  Sarah’s father was George Franklin Burnham, and the line continues through Mary Ann Huntley (Burnham), Sally Huntley (Hitchcock), and Gaius Hitchcock.  By this time, we are back in colonial New England; Gaius was born in Massachusetts in 1864 and died in Vermont in 1843.

Before I continue to explore this connection, I want to mention that the birth name of Gaius’s wife was Ruth Stebbins.  I recognized the Stebbins name from my family tree back into colonial Massachusetts, so I checked this out a bit.  Ruth Stebbins was the 3^rd great-granddaughter of Rowland Stebbins, my 11^th great-grandfather.  That makes Ruth my 4^th cousin 8x removed or something along those lines.  This provides another connection to Grover Cleveland, one that may be more direct without going through the Hunt family at all.  I am a direct descendant of Rowland Stebbins through my Arnold family line; as we’ll see, Grover Cleveland descends directly from Rowland Stebbins as well.  Gaius had a sister named Margaret, who married William Cleveland.  I traced this line while I was analyzing the WikiTree connection.  From there, the line is clear through Margaret Cleveland’s daughter (also named) Margaret, her son Richard Cleveland, and his son Stephen Grover Cleveland.

So this connection checks out in two different ways.  Always fun!