of public distinction attained from humble beginnings.

The antecedents of Cleveland were Americans of the best type. He
was descended from a colonial stock which had settled in the
Connecticut Valley. His earliest ancestor of whom there is any
exact knowledge was Aaron Cleveland, an Episcopal clergyman, who
died at East Haddam, Connecticut, in 1757, after founding a
family which in every generation furnished recruits to the
ministry. It argues a hereditary disposition for independent
judgment that among these there was a marked variation in
denominational choice. Aaron Cleveland was so strong in his
attachment to the Anglican church that to be ordained he went to
England--under the conditions of travel in those days a hard,
serious undertaking. His son, also named Aaron, became a
Congregational minister. Two of the sons of the younger Aaron
became ministers, one of them an Episcopalian like his
grandfather. Another son, William, who became a prosperous
silversmith, was for many years a deacon in the church in which
his father preached. William sent his second son, Richard, to
Yale, where he graduated with honors at the age of nineteen. He
turned to the Presbyterian church, studied theology at Princeton,
and upon receiving ordination began a ministerial career which
like that of many preachers was carried on in many pastorates. He
was settled at Caldwell, New Jersey, in his third pastorate, and
there Stephen Grover Cleveland was born, on March 18, 1837, the
fifth in a family of children that eventually increased to nine.
He was named after the Presbyterian minister who was his father's
predecessor. The first name soon dropped out of use, and from
childhood he went by his middle name, a practice of which the
Clevelands supply so many instances that it seems to be quite a