The Cree family of Oxcroft in Bolsover, Derbyshire

The brothers John and James Cree were both baptised in Clowne parish church in the 1760s, and James survived to tell the Census Enumerator in 1851 that he was born at Damsbrook. This is a farm just along the lane from Oxcroft, but on the opposite side and so in Clowne parish, because the lane forms the parish boundary between Clowne and Bolsover.

Their father John Cree (born 1720) had acquired Damsbrook by his marriage to a widow, Elizabeth Short, but they moved back to Oxcroft, in about 1764, possibly when John inherited the Oxcroft holding from his father James Cree.

John Cree Jnr. in turn inherited the Oxcroft land in the 1790s and clung on to his 40 acres or so through the bad years then and in the 1820s. Twice married, he never managed to produce children. His first wife Ann Farnsworth put her "portion" in trust on their wedding day so that it went to her sons by her previous marriage. After Ann's death, John married Mary Duckmanton of Elmton, one of the six daughters of a neighbouring farmer. Mary was probably too old to have children by then, but they would have given each other companionship into their old age. She died aged 74 and he was 85 when he passed away a year later. They must have at least kept up the appearances of some comfort for John described himself as a yeoman, and then in his will as a gentleman. Their grave in Elmton churchyard is marked by the only Cree tombstones that I have found in the Bolsover district.

The younger brother by two years, James married Alice Richardson, but it was a marriage marred by the death of their only child George at the age of two, and then by Alice's own death three years later. James then also married one of the Duckmanton daughters. Sarah was 39 and bore him a son and a daughter. James and Sarah were, like their brother and sister, blessed with long life at their farm near the centre of Clowne village. Their son, yet another John, moved to Oxcroft, which he helped his Uncle John to farm, until he himself inherited it in 1847. The following year he married Mary Ann Eatson who was only eighteen. It seems he eventually sold up the Oxcroft farm in the 1860s and went to live at his father's farm in Clowne High Street.

John's wife Mary Ann died in 1878, and her mother, now Fanny Woodhead and twice widowed, moved in with John Cree as housekeeper. The 1881 Census shows she was 71, only four years older than her son-in-law. This means she had been twenty at her second marriage, to William Woodhead in 1830, and only eighteen herself when her daughter Mary Ann was born.

With John's death in 1902, the senior branch of Bolsover Crees, and the 300-year-old link to Oxcroft, came to an end. By a coincidence, Lizzie Cree, a member of the most junior branch, descended from Francis Cree of Bolsover, had now moved back to Bolsover - a hundred years after her great-grandfather Joshua Cree had left the parish.