Overview

In the year 1600, just about everyone with the surname Cree (or Crie as it was spelt then) lived in Perthshire, Scotland. In fact they lived within about 15 km of the burgh of Perth - roughly the green area shown on the Map of Scottish Cree lines. There was an isolated Cree family in London. We have not found where they came from or any trace of descendants.

Although we don't have details of who migrated to Ireland first, it does seem that the first migration away from this Cree heartland around Perth was all the way to Ireland. This is described on the Ireland page.

It is not until near the end of the Seventeenth Century that we start to see any other Cree families moving from this Cree heartland around Perth to other parts of Scotland. See the Migration in Scotland page.

An Irish Cree line seems to have originated in Ennis, County Clare around 1700 and migrated via Dublin to England, eventually settling in Dorset.

The Cree line that originated in Bolsover in the 1640s also remained fairly static for the first generation. But one member of this line moved away in 1733. After this, migration gathered pace, and Crees were soon to be found as far away as Manchester(!) always leaving the eldest son of the senior branch to take over the tenancy of the Cree land at Oxcroft. See the Migration in England page.

Meanwhile the Crees who had migrated from Scotland to County Down had multiplied. In the 1760 or 1770s at least six of them (including two pairs of brothers) migrated to the USA. See our page on migration to the USA.

Migration was not all one way - outward from Britain and Ireland. A Hugenot immigrant to England, Pierre Carré, had settled in Canterbury by 1706 and by 1860 - the sixth generation - some of his descendants had anglicised the name to Cree.

An article in the Journal of One-Name Studies Motives for Migration by Mike Spathaky looks at the subject of migration generally, using the Cree One-Name Study to provide many examples of where and how people moved away from friends and families. (Journal of One-Name Studies Vol. 6 no. 4., October 1997.) This is a 2.5 MB download.

Convict emigrants

Two Crees were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Although they were unrelated to each other - one was English, the other Scottish - they and the circumstances of their convictions were remarkably similar. The first was Jane Cree born in 1827 near Newark, Nottinghamshire, who was transported to Van Diemans Land (Tasmania) in 1847 at the age of 20. Her crime? Stealing a few articles of clothing from her sister and a watch from her brother. They acted as witnesses against her.

Janet Cree was a French polisher from Glasgow. She was transported in 1829, also to Tasmania and also at the age of twenty. Her offence was stealing a plaid. Both Jane and Janet married in Australia (Janet only two years after her arrival there) and both have descendants there today (though not of the Cree name of course).

For more details see Jane Cree and Janet Cree