by Mike Spathaky
[Draft of an article submitted to the Journal of One-Name Studies]
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When I was thirteen years old my grandmother, Annie Cree, showed me her family Bible with the names of five generations of her ancestors written on the fly-sheets. I was fascinated and started my first transcription project, in the process learning to type on Grandpop's typewriter, a new technology for me.
A couple of years later I wandered into my parish church in rural Norfolk and in the vestry I found a chest - the “sure coffer” decreed by Thomas Cromwell in 1538 to be kept in every parish vestry. Inside was the parish register. Records back to the 1500s were written in a neat Chancery hand on calf-skin vellum pages. As I read the ancient records of baptisms, marriages and burials I reflected that there were far more burials recorded here than on the ancient headstones outside the church. Clearly pen and vellum were a technological advance on carvings in stone.
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When I took up family history in earnest around 1989 most of my research was done in County Records Offices, to which parish registers had been transferred. We were still mostly handling original registers. Technology was represented by the microfiche International Genealogy Index (the IGI) produced by the Mormons, which was a very partial index of those registers.
Meanwhile Trevor Cree spent many hours over many days in St Catherine’s House, London, and New Register House, Edinburgh, extracting the Cree entries from the indexes of births, marriages and deaths, which he published (using spreadsheets) in book form. Coming across a copy of his “Cree - Volume 1” in 1988, I straight away started on family reconstructions and thus was born the Cree One-Name Study. Trevor and I have collaborated on Cree surname research ever since, although we have not met face to face more than half a dozen times.
Our Cree One-Name Society attained world-wide membership of over a hundred during its ten-year life in the 1990s. Conferences were held, newsletters published and lively correspondence maintained around the world. The late Charles Cree in Houston, Texas, became our North America representative and I would email him the files of Cree News so that he could print and post copies to our American members, saving much on postage. He also undertook a successful mailshot of US and Canadian Crees.
We found that others had researched branches of Cree genealogy in England, Scotland and America long before us, and we started to realise how widely distributed the name was. We found separate lines originating in England, Scotland and Ireland and spreading to all parts of the English-speaking world (and occasionally beyond). The Scottish name Cree (with its earlier spelling Crie) has occurrences back to 1459 and is a surname in its own right. Other lines have become Cree as variants of different names and have themselves spawned variants. From the early 1990s the research became a true one-name study, incorporating the researches of previous family historians, collecting records on a world-wide basis and pushing the family reconstructions onwards with the increasing availability of records.
Within a few years I had a four-drawer filing cabinet full of records and several metres of shelf space full of lever-arch files and ring-binders containing the correspondence and records of the one-name study.
Early on I bought a genealogy software package, The Master Genealogist (TMG), with which I created and still manage a lineage-linked database of details of every individual who can be related to a Cree family line. At first I kept a separate database for each group of Cree lines - the Scottish, Irish, English and so on. Robert H Cree of Pennsylvania, sent GEDCOMs of five Cree lines originating in that state in the 1700s, the result of fifty years research. He said that the Cree One-Name Study was what he had been looking for to preserve his work as he approached his eighties.
I later combined the separate databases into a single large one. As TMG allocates a unique identifying number to every person, we could now identify each person by this “Cree ID.”
I have digitised most of the paper records in recent years. Now almost all the material is on the Cree One-Name Study web site at www.cree.name. So in a sense it is already “in the cloud” on a reputable hosting company’s web servers. It is also well backed up to on-site and off-site locations.
The web site now contains virtually all of the data collected. Much of this is in spreadsheet format, with indexes of Cree births, marriages and deaths from many countries, the Scottish Old Parochial Registers Index, ships’ passenger lists, newspaper indexes and military records indexes around the world. Over twenty such spreadsheets are available for download in the Lists Section of the site.
More text-rich material can be viewed in the Archives Section. This includes transcriptions of mediaeval documents that throw light on the development of the surname in the period before we have connected genealogies. There are also transcriptions of documents relating to particular Cree individuals whose lives have been researched in detail, such as Irishman John Cree who made his fortune in 18th century Bengal as a free East India merchant; Joe Cree who migrated with his wife Martha and six children to America in 1843 to escape the poverty of north-east Derbyshire; and “Birdie” Cree who established the Yankees franchise record (later broken) for most triples in a season, with 22 in 1911, and whose 48 stolen bases that year remains the eighth-highest figure in franchise history.
More extended pieces of work of booklet length are also included in the Archives Section. Many of these were originally print editions in the Cree Booklets series, such as the meticulously kept shipboard diary of newly-married Jesse Cree who set sail from Greenock, Scotland, in 1861 with a flock of sheep and sundry other farm animals to join her husband in Oamaru, New Zealand. Biographies and wills also find a place in this section, which is therefore crossing the line between raw data and the analysis of that data.
Binding all this together is the Database Section. A program called Second Site converts the genealogy database created by TMG into web pages, including a Person Details page for every person in the database (apart from those still alive). Each person is linked to their ancestors and descendants through web links, mini-pedigree charts and full descendancy charts. The web pages are created off-line and uploaded to the web site. They are static web pages compiled in HTML and Javascript so no live on-line database is required. This makes the whole site portable - to DVD for example: a DVD containing the web site is submitted to the Guild Archives every six months or so.
The Cree ID number allocated by TMG is used to tag the entries in the spreadsheets of the Lists Section. Clearly many people in the lists will not yet have been identified as members of trees in the Database Section, so their Cree IDs in the spreadsheet remain blank. The ratio of completed to blank Cree IDs gives us a good measure of our progress in reconstructing Cree families, branches and lines.
Other links between individuals are created throughout the web site and I regard this as a major benefit of a web-based study, in that every viewer will use the site in their own personal way by following the links that interest them. Few, if any, will want to read a web site of over a thousand pages from beginning to end!
In my view a one-name study is nothing if the results of its researches are not published to ensure their availability for posterity. The web site is of course an ideal medium for publication. Central to this is the Family History Section in which we take each Cree line and branch in turn and summarise its history in a narrative form that brings out the full flavour of the unique story of its people and ancestral lines and gives a new aspect to history, hopefully back to the time when surnames began - history as experienced by people with the surname Cree.
Cree may be an unusual surname in that we have identified five origins that are geographically and linguistically distinct. An Origins Section paints a broad brush picture across all Cree lines around the world and clarifies their distribution, migrations and origins.
The News Section gives the latest news of research developments. It also contains copies of all issues of the printed newsletter Cree News from the 1990s and a full sequence of the web-based news bulletins that replaced it.
Communication is more effective if it is a two-way process so our Contacts Section encourages users of the web site to contact us - and also each other through the interactive Cree Family History Network. This is a sister web site run by fellow researcher Trevor Cree which provides opportunities to post on forums, create blogs, and exchange messages, photographs and copies of documents. This has resulted in wider participation in the one-name study and has enabled people to disseminate their family knowledge and research results to the wider Cree Family History Network with an immediacy that was not possible earlier. This data can then be incorporated into the more structured Cree Surname web site.
Another linked web site is that of the Cree YDNA Surname Project, started and maintained by Cree researcher Gary Maher in the USA. DNA testing has confirmed links between several Cree lines and has also led to some intriguing mysteries.
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In summary the web site now comprises all aspects of the one-name study, the collection of data, its analysis and synthesis, collaboration between Cree researchers and the publication of results.
So can the filing cabinet really go? Not quite. It will still house the family Bible, and my 1955 typescript where I added two more generations down to myself and my cousins. Now there are two more generations: my grandchildren will inherit the Bible. I just hope that, after my death, further generations will keep the web site alive, accessible to all, not just as a DVD in an archive, because now, for me, the web site is the one-name study.