Crawford Cree - leading us a merry dance! |
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Earlier this year I was interested to find a William McLelland Cree and other members of his family in the Queensland BDM indexes. A web search led me to Kerry Raymond in Queensland who told me that William’s death record gave his parents as Crawford Cree and Jessie McLellan. His obituary in the local newspaper claimed he was 66 years and 8 months old and that he was born in Blairgowrie, Scotland. Soon after, I received an email from Elena Turner, also in Australia, asking specifically about Crawford Cree: I am looking for info about Crawford Cree born approx. 1840, and he married Janet McLellan who had a daughter Jessie McLellan born in Dumbarton Scotland 11/1/1857. and died 16/7/1928 at Rockhampton Queensland Australia… I have looked through the Cree index and can not find Crawford Cree anywhere. Maybe you could help me. |
Our own Cree BMD Indexes (compiled by Trevor Cree) showed several Crawford Cree records. The births were all too late to be the Crawford Cree we were after. One of the deaths, in Glasgow might have been his. Then there was a marriage in 1865 at Dumbarton. Dumbarton linked in with both Kerry’s and Elena’s emails, so it looked promising. But who was Crawford’s father? The marriage certificate would say, so I sent off for it. This certainly gave the answer, but asked more questions. Crawford Cree was to lead us a merry dance! His parents were John Cree and Annie Hill who lived in the wee village of St Quivox just outside Ayr. They were already “known to us” and led straight back to ancestors James Cree and Christian Graeme who married in 1770 in Auchterarder. Their son, also James, was one the first migrants to leave Perthshire for a better life in the West of Scotland. So we had established Crawford Cree’s ancestry. However there was a major surprise in the marriage certificate - read on… |
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We were now starting to get a fuller picture of Crawford Cree’s life. We have still not found a birth record but he was four at the 1851 Census and this seems to be the most reliable of many sources for his birth year. So in about 1847 he was born as the eighth of nine children of John Cree and Annie Hill of St Quivox, Ayrshire. Annie died when he was about two years old and in 1851 he was living with two other siblings in the household of his eldest sister Mary who was a seamstress in nearby Wallacetown. By the age of fifteen, the 1861 census shows him living in lodgings at Dumbarton, along with his cousin Daniel Hill, Both are working for a pawnbroker. Perhaps Crawford’s father was already dead. Certainly he was by the time Crawford was eighteen. In 1865 Crawford fathers a son, named William McLellan Cree on the birth certificate. He was born on the 8th June in Calton, Glasgow. The mother, Jessie McLellan from Dumbarton, already had an illegitimate daughter, Jessie McLellan at the age of sixteen. So I expected Crawford Cree’s 1865 marriage certificate to show Jessie as the bride - Kerry and I were very surprised when it showed he was marrying Mary Ann Oliver. The wedding date was 1st June, just a week before Crawford’s son was born! What is happening here? At that stage Kerry Raymond was not convinced that this was the same Crawford Cree. She wrote: |
If there is only one Crawford Cree, then clearly around 1865, Crawford’s life gets very complicated. He marries Mary Ann Oliver on 1 June and then on 8 June, William is born illegitimate to Janet/Jessie McLellan. Janet was born at Alexandria, Dunbartonshire, which happens to be Crawford’s usual residence on his marriage certificate to Mary Oliver, so it’s quite plausible they met in that area. And it’s quite plausible that if Janet had an illegitimate child, she may have preferred to do so away from home and hence favoured the anonymity of a large city like Glasgow. Maybe Crawford and Janet had a fling, she found she was pregnant and slunk away to Glasgow in shame, then Crawford marries Mary Ann and then discovers that he’s had a son by Janet and decides he prefers Janet to Mary Ann (or maybe Janet’s father Andrew has more fearsome threats), and so he and Janet run off to Blairgowrie to avoid the wrath of Mary Ann and family. Certainly if Crawford is married to Mary Ann, it explains why nobody can find a marriage to Janet McLelland. Soon after writing that, Kerry found that the marriage lasted just over a year, as Mary Ann died on 13th August 1866. Crawford Cree, now a pawnbroker in his own right, was the informant. Kerry followed Crawford Cree through census returns - with some persistence as his surname was transcribed as CREL in 1871 and CREES in 1881! By 1871 he was living with Jessie McLellan, the mother of his son William, in Blairgowrie, Perthshire and was a Friendly Society Agent. As Kerry wrote to me: |
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So we have to re-write history (again!). It seems Crawford didn’t leave Mary Anne for Janet McLellan as Crawford appears as the informant for Mary Anne’s death. Crawford must have taken up with Janet after Mary Anne’s death. So why didn’t Crawford and Janet marry, if he was free to do so? Yet we find them in 1871 happily living together in Blairgowrie, complete with Janet’s father Andrew who clearly wasn’t insisting on a shotgun wedding for his daughter! In 1881 Crawford and Janet (as she was now called) were in the Glasgow parish of Kinning Park and had three more children, all born in Perthshire, so they had only recently moved to Glasgow. The address was 15 Keydan St, Kinning Park, Glasgow. Crawford’s brother David Cree was living with his wife, Margaret Slaven, and family at 16 Keydon Street, Govan, Glasgow. In spite of the different parishes and street spellings I suspect the two brothers were close neighbours. Crawford and Janet had one more child Crawford in 1884, but sadly both the child and Janet herself died that year. Possibly her death was related to the childbirth although the certificate says peritonitis. She is described as “single” at her death, a final admission by Crawford that they had never actually married. The following year, 1885, sees Crawford marrying Marion Stewart who was ten years his junior. At 28 she was taking on his three under-ten children. Crawford and Marion had a further six children over the next thirteen years, the family being shown in the 1891 and 1901 census records at different addresses in Kinning Park. |
Crawford Cree died in 1909 at the age of 62. The death certificate says he was “married to Janet McLellan & Marion Stewart.” Clearly his widow Marion Stewart knew nothing about Mary Ann Oliver. Marion lived another 24 years, dying in 1925. Why were my two Australian correspondents, Kerry Raymond and Elena Turner, so interested in Crawford Cree? Well William McLellan Cree, whose birth on 8th June 1865 seems to have caused so much bother, migrated to Queensland in 1881 and he is an ancestor of Kerry Raymond. And William’s sister Jessie McLellan, Janet McLelland’s illegimate daughter born in 1857, migrated in 1882 (or possibly they migrated together) and she is Elena’s ancestor. Genealogy links: Best Wishes,
Mike Spathaky
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