In this paper, we present a general error analysis framework for the finite volume element (FVE) approximation to the Ritz-Volterra projection, the Sobolev equations and parabolic integro-differential equations. The main idea in our paper is to consider the FVE methods as perturbations of standard finite element methods which enables us to derive the optimal L2 and H1 norm error estimates, and the L1 and W1 1 norm error estimates by means of the time dependent Green functions. Our discussions also include elliptic and parabolic problems as the special cases.