Origins

The sources of the Cree surnames that we have established "beyond reasonable doubt" are:

• 1. Perthshire. As we go back in time, several Cree line converge on the Scottish burgh of Perth and the parishes adjacent to it within a radius of about 15 kilometres. The lines cannot be connected with solid genealogical proof but their geographical proximity in the early Seventeenth Century makes it certain they are related. Further back there were Crees (though with earlier spellings) associated with Perth in the 1600s and even a John of Cre in 1459 and 1462.
• 2. Derbyshire. A Cree line was established in the small town of Bolsover, Deerbsyhire, England. We have located the baptism there of James Cree as the son of Alexander Mackree. That was in 1644 which pinpoints the origin of this Cree line.
• 3. County Clare. A Cree line emerges from Ennis, the county town of County Clare in the west of Ireland, around 1700. John Cree of Ennis is mentioned as being the progenitor of a Cree line which settled in Dorset, England, in 1787. He must have been born around 1690. While Cree is not a known surname in Ennis at that time, the surname Creagh certainly is. It is one the top few surnames in County Clare in those troubled times. It seems likely that this Cree line acquired thier surname as a variation of the name Creagh.
• 4. Kent. A Henry Corree used the spelling Cree at his marriage in Canterbury in 1848 and it has been used ever since down to his present-day descendants. Corree was an intermedate version of his great-grandfather's name Carré, the intervening generations having used yet another version, Carey.

There are earlier occurrences in London, some though not all named after a church, St Catherine Creechurch. At least two lines in the nerth-east of England have not been connected to any of the lines already mentioned. Cree and its variants also occur as surnames, apparently independently, in the France, Germany and, rarely, as a surname of indigenous people in the USA. See the Family History Section via the left-hand menu for more details of these occurrences. Cry and Crye in the Isle of Man are probably not variants of Cree but of Mc Cray.