This is the death notice that Ben Franklin wrote in his newspaper for his friend:

“On Thursday last, after a lingering illness, died here the Rev. Mr. Cleveland, lately appointed to the mission at Newcastle by the Society for Propagating the Gospel. As he was a gentleman of a humane and pious disposition, indefatigable in his ministry, easy and affable in his conversation, open and sincere in his friendship, and above every species of meanness and dissimulation, his death is greatly lamented by all who knew him as a loss to the public, a loss to the Church of Christ in general, and in particular to that congregation who had proposed to themselves so much satisfaction from his late appointment among them, agreeable to their own request.”

Aaron Cleveland left a young son, also named Aaron (Grover Cleveland’s great-grandfather.), born in 1744, who returned to the town of his birth, East Haddam, Connecticut shortly after the death of his father and lived in Norwich, Connecticut for most of his adult life. He was a minister like his father but of the Congregationalist Church, instead of Episcopal and was best known for his opposition to slavery. He was also a member of the Connecticut Legislature for Norwich, and introduced a bill for the abolition of slavery in his State. He died in New Haven in 1815, He had 12 children, his first son, Charles, was born in 1772, in Norwich, and became a city missionary in Boston, where he lived to be nearly one hundred years old, and was widely known as “ Father Cleveland.” His youngest child, a daughter, married Dr. Samuel H. Coxe, a distinguished clergyman of New York City, whose son, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, became Episcopal Bishop of Western New York. His second son, William Cleveland was Grover Cleveland’s grandfather. He was a silversmith and watchmaker and lived the greater part of his life at Beacon Hill, on the outskirts of Norwich where he was a deacon of the Congregational Church for 25 years. He married Margaret Falley. He died at Black Rock, near Buffalo, New York, in 1837.

William Cleveland’s second son was Richard Falley Cleveland, born at Norwich, June 19, 1805, who was the father of Grover Cleveland. As a young man William was a factory boy together with his cousin William E. Dodge, who afterwards came to New York, and became a great and wealthy businessman, and was widely known as a philanthropist.

Richard Falley Cleveland entered Yale in 1820, and graduated in 1824 in a class of sixty-eight. From college he went to Baltimore and found employment as a tutor in a private school. Here he became acquainted with Miss Anne Neale, the daughter of a wealthy law-book publisher and merchant, of Irish birth. After a year in Baltimore he went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied theology and became a Presbyterian clergyman.

In 1829 he returned to Baltimore to marry Anne Neale. His first position as a clergyman was at Windham, Connecticut; the second at Portsmouth, Virginia; and the third at the little village of Caldwell, near Newark, New Jersey. It was here, in the little Presbyterian parsonage, that Grover Cleveland was born, the 18th of March, 1837. He was the fifth of nine children:

Anna, who became Mrs. Dr. Hastings, missionary to Ceylon; William N., born 1832, an alumnus of Hamilton College, Clinton, N. Y., and then a Presbyterian minister at Forestport, N. Y.; Mary, born 1833 (Mrs. W. E. Hoyt); Richard Cecil, born 1835; Stephen Grover, born 1837; Margaret, born 1838 (Mrs. N. B. Bacon); Lewis Frederick, born 1841 Susan, born 1843 (Mrs. Yeomans); Rose E., born 1846.

Stephen Grover Cleveland was named in honor of Rev. Stephen Grover, the pastor who had preceded his father in the church at Caldweil, N. J. From childhood he had been called Grover, and had always written his name simply Grover Cleveland.

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