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Clevelands on the Island BY THEODORE C. WYMAN
ALL THROUGH THE YEARS that I have worked on genealo gies of various branches of the family I have come to realize that, in a way, I have been surrounded by family history. And a part of that family history has to do with the time I lived for ten years on the island of Nantucket. At that time I knew, in a general way, that some of my grandmother's family, originally the Cleavelands, later written Cleveland, had lived on the Vine yard. And then as I worked on a history of the Cleveland fam ily, I found that a very large number of that family had lived on the Vineyard and on Nantucket. Not only had they lived on Nantucket, but several of them had been captains of whaling ships and they had descended from the Moses Cleveland from whom I had descended. That Moses Cleveland and his brother Aaron Cleveland, from whom President Grover Cleveland had descended, were the sons of Moses Cleveland who came from Ipswich, England in 1635 and who was one of the early settlers of Woburn. Most of the information came from a genealogy of the Cleveland family at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, but there was more information to be found in the Whaling Museum in Nantucket. And I was able to find the graves of two of the Cleveland family on the island, one of them that of Capt. Henry Cleveland (1798-1875) who was captain of the whaleship Richard Mitchell. So it seems that, to some extent, my own life had followed a pattern similar to that of many of the Cleveland family. They had lived on the islands, followed the sea to many parts of the world, and served in var ious wars. And that seems to be what I have done. In a genealogy of the Cleveland family that I finished in 1971, I included a record of many of the family who had lived on the Vineyard and on Nantucket. And some of the records were made because of my interest in the connection of the Cleveland family with so many of the island families I have known. There was also the connection with the whaling industry as sea cap tains and ship owners as well as service in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and settlement in other parts of the world. There was all that, but what I shall include here are just a few of the records found in a genealogy of the Cleveland family at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and then some things found in various records at the Whaling Mu seum while on a visit there in 1972. As for the records found in the genealogy of the Cleveland family, they might be confusing to read by anyone who has never been interested in putting
