From Scotland to Ireland

As far as our research has determined, the Cree surname was confined to within 15 kilometres of the burgh of Perth until after the year 1600. It was know there as early as 1459, and there were probably Cree merchants there for about 400 years from that date.

The first migration of any Cree that we know of was to Ireland, almost certainly as part of the Hamilton-Montgomery Plantation. We have very few details. We don't know if it was one individual or several who made the journey, but it probably took place between 1607, the starting date of the Hamilton-Montgomery Plantation, and 1630, the date when the Cree name first appears in County Down.

The 1690s

Up to 1690 there seems to have been no permanent migration of Crees from Perth. The few isolated marriage and baptism records that we have seen do not seem to have resulted in permanent settlement. Like James Crie who married Isobel Fleming in Edinburgh 1638, they mostly returned to Perth or failed to establish a Cree dynasty elsewhere.

The 1690s however were a period of economic, political and religious turmoil throughout Scotland. For whatever reasons the Cree surname (almost always as "Crie") starts to crop up in several places around the Lowlands.

Crees in Glasgow

The first three migrants to Glasgow (that we know of) all came from the adjacent parishes of Methven and Tibbermore in Perthshire. They were all related.

In 1694 it is recorded that Patrick Cree married Marie Watson in the High Kirk at Glasgow. He can be identified as having been born in Methven near Perth. He became a respected merchnt in Glasgow and Master of Works of its Council for many years .
Patrick was followed to Glasgow by his nephew John Crie, also from Methven, in the 1730s. John had served as an apprentice to the Deacon of Cordiners (shoemakers) in Perth. Perhaps to avoid competing with his older shoemaker brother James, he moved to Glasgow where he married Margaret Pow in 1743 and rose to become Deacon of the Incorporation of Cordiners. (James stayed in Perth to occupy the same office there.)
Again nephew followed uncle in migrating from the Methven-Tibbermore area to marry Agnes McFarland in the High Kirk in 1760 and settle in Glasgow. John Crie's nephew was another John, another shoemaker, though his surname was now spelt Cree.

As Glasgow grew in the Ninteenth Century to become Britain's largest city outside London, many more Cree individuals settled there.

See also:
Focus on: The Glasgow Merchant Crees (from Cree News 5, October 1992)

Crees migrating from Glasgow

Many Crees moved from Glasgow to nearby Ayrshire whose coalfields, other resources and strategic location gave it an edge in applying new technologies of the industrial revolution. Of greater significance perhaps for us were the migrations overseas.

The descendants of John Crie the shoemaker (the one who married in 1743) became a wealthy dynasty. One grandson James Cree, migrated to Ireland where he set up as a merchant in Limerick. A great-great-granddaughter Jessie who emigrated with her husband to New Zealand taking some sheep which were to be the foundation of the sheep stocks of South Island. The story of her voyage is told in detail in her diary.
The later John Cree shoemaker had two sons who separately migrated to Maine, USA, one at least having fought in the American Revolutionary War. A third son, David stayed in Glasgow following his ancestral trade as a shoemaker. However his grandson Archibald Cree had the wandering bug. He qualified as a Presbyterian minister and took ministries around Scotland and England before taking his wife and nine children to North Carolina in 1889 where he became a Baptist minister.

Further migrations

Related to the Crees who migrated to Glasgow was James Crie who, as we have mentioned, married Isobel Fleming in Edinburgh. He returned to Perth to found a dynasty of Provosts (Mayors) of Perth. His son James Crie was the first such. while two sons of this Provost Crie themselves became Provosts and one had a daughter whose husband became Provost too! Several other sons moved, not far at first, just down the Tay to Abernethy where descendants thrived for many generations fishing salmon and selling beer - there is still a Cree's Inn at Abernethy. We now believe that the next generation of the Abernethy families were the origins of Crees that turn up in Biggar, Lanarkshire, (in 1730) and in Sprotbrough, Yorkshire, (1740).

The Biggar branch became nurserymen, with further generations keeping to this occupation but migarting to the nearby town of Lanark, and the rather further afield to Addlestone in Surrey. Another descendant of the Biggar Cree branch became an excise officer. After being moved around the country he finally settled in Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland, where his children stayed on as another Irish Cree branch.
It was William Cree who turned up in Sprotbrough whom we think probably came from Abernethy. His son, also William, moved to London and founded a flourishing branch of Cree lawyers, naval officers and Anglican ministers, mainly settling around the southern part of England, although there is one branch in Ballarat, Australia.
One Cree who turns up in the rural parish of Kingskettle in Fife in 1690 was Thomas Cray. His great-grandson moved from Kettle to Gloucestershire, England, where he married Cecilia Hodges. They then moved to Plymouth. His grandson was naval surgeon Edward H Cree who sailed the seven seas as a naval surgeon but always returned to his home near Plymouth. Arthur Hamilton Cree, one of Edward's brothers, migrated to British Columbia where he has Cree descendants today.

Migration does not always arise out of economic necessity. In 1880 James Cree, an Edinburgh wine merchant of the Kingskettle line bought land in New Mexico, presumably from the profits of the wine trade, and became a rancher. His Cree great-grandchildren now live in Houston, Texas. The land in New Mexico was still in the family's hands in the 1990s and may yet be now.

The Forteviot Cree line

The hamlet and parish of Forteviot lies just to the south-west of Perth and from it emerged a Cree line that has many branches and many Cree descendants alive today. The first two generations from Thomas Crie largely stayed in Forteviot and its neighbouring parishes of Aberdalgie and Dunning. Some moved into the nearby town of Perth.

One descendant, Peter Campbell Cree, moved to South Shields on the NE coast of England and became a ship's pilot. His son also became a pilot but the branch came to an end when Peter's grandson, an assistant pilot was killed when the pilot cutter hit a German mine at the mouth of the River Tyne in 1916.

The number of Crees in this branch really started to multiply when Thomas's grandson James got married to Christian Grame at Dunning in 1771. They had six sons of whom two also had six sons. Crees started to spead all over the Lowlands: in the next generation they had settled in the little village of St Quivox near Ayr; the new textile town of Blantyre, Lanarkshire; Leven, Fife; and Dundee, Angus. Another generation on, they were also in Kilmarnock and Riccarton in Ayrshire and Bothwell, Lanarkshire, and many were attracted to the growing industrial city of Glasgow.

Later generations spread to Buckinghamshire, England (2383); London (2959); Northwich, Cheshire (2085 and 2048); Sunderland, Co.Durham (2563); Whickham, Co. Durham (4 brothers 2041 etc.); Bristol (2780); Portsmouth (7539); and Farnham, Surrey (2192). Overseas there were Cree families settled in Toronto, Canada (2816); Sydney (2916 and 2781); Wellington, New Zealand (7543); and Alexandria, Egypt (2357 and children).

Please note that the figures in brackets here refer to the Cree ID numbers which you can use to look up these individuals using the Quick Search panel of the Cree On-line Genealogy Database.