The Genealogy of Cleveland/Cleaveland Families book reliability.

Question

This book is listed at the bottom of the list of sources for Alexander Cleveland.

https://archive.org/details/genealogyofcleve03clev/page/2056

Has anyone used this book to know how reliable it is? I am particularly interested in the 3rd generation Alexander Cleveland and son William Cleveland.

Comments

After doing some searching on the web, I found that a) there are known errors in the series, and b) there is a controversy over whether the immigrant ancestor was a 3rd Alexander Cleveland or a Roger Cleveland.

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I have a hunch that the credibility of this book may depend on the geography and the time period. The book attempts to cover several different Cleveland families  with different immigrant ancestors, living in different areas. It's unlikely that the compiler had the same quality of information for all families named Cleveland.

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Edmund and Horace Cleveland who wrote this multi volumn genealogy are somewhat distant relatives. One of my genealogical curiosities is the correspondence between my great grandmother Frances Ross Razey (whose grandmother was a Cleveland) and one of the brothers while they were compiling the information for the book.

Some of the correspondence is them asking her for details on the Ross and Reed branches of the extended family and other is them asking her to corroborate or correct information they had gleaned from other people or other sources. I only have one side of the conversation and have always been curious what Frances was sending them.  In terms of their work with people alive at the time of compiling, the process seems rather remarkable and daunting in scope. They would also offer Frances the next volume to be printed for the kindness of a few postage stamps along with answers to their queries. The brothers were highly successful businessmen with no need for money and obviously the time to undertake their task.

All distant familial bias aside, for the time period in which this was done I have found the accuracy remarkable, decidedly several cuts above the average genealogical effort of the period. The further back you go in their research the more likely you are to find errors simply because of the limitations of how research could be done in that age and what was known to be available. As Ellen suggests above, I suspect the quality of the information on a given family line was to an extent reliant upon the quality of information gathered from living people and in some cases paper records.

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T Stanton, that source pops up for me occasionally on Ancestry.com, and your assessment sounds fair to me. I can't recall how it did in my cases, but it definitely gave me a good impression.

In contrast, the family genealogy for my grandmother's family was done by an unmarried teacher. She just wouldn't have had the budget to do as good a job, back in the early 1900s. She did a good job as far as tracking everybody down, but many of the dates for things are a bit screwed up. It's useful, but not always precise that way.

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Thank you for all the replies.

Answer 1

There is more information here: The Genealogy of the Cleveland and Cleaveland Families, including the start of an Errata and a link to Additions and Corrections at the NEHGS web site.

Answer 2

I have done extensive research from my own family documents and researched in painstaking detail my forefather and mothers on Ancestry.Com. Alexander E. Cleveland was my great great grandfather. His son was Charles Clarence Cleveland (my great grandfather), and my father was Charles Clarence Cleveland II. If you have an Ancestry account, I would be happy to link you in to see the Cleveland linage, or answer any questions you have.