Distribution maps from ancestry.com

The set of three maps below shows the way distribution of the surname Cree has changed over the period 1830 to 1920. Note that it is the number of famil,ies that is being counted here, not the number of individuals. (This makes it more comparable with our UK survery for 1720 but not with our more recent tables and maps for the UK.) It should also be notede that these maps represent the number of families in each state, not their frequency.

1840

The first map shows that the state of Pennsylvania is the main population centre for the name in 1840, shown in the darkest brown colour. This is where we know that five Cree branches from Ireland had settled by the 1780s. They have multiplied over the two or three generations since their migration, and have started to spread west, mainly to Ohio, the adjacant state, with one to three families also in Illnois.

A slightly lighter shade of brown shows the related branch of Joseph Cree in New Jersey, and the known separate families in Maine and Massachusetts, each of these three states having four to eight families. There is one family, or perhaps two of three, in New York State.

1880

Note that each shade of brown now represents a much larger number of families than in the 1840 map. Forty years on the Cree surname is mulitplying in its heartland of Pennsylvania, and has entrenched its position westward and southward across a number of states. It now has at least a foothold in about half the states of the union.

The absence of families in Maine would be puzzling, since we know they were there at that time, until we realise that the Maine branches used the spelling CRIE and may not have been counted as CREE in the ancestry.com data.

1920

As the Crees become more dispersed across the whole country, the numbers represented by each colour drops back a little. Pennsylvania is still the Cree heartland but the march west has been relentless and at least eleven families, possibly almost thirty, have reached California.

Cree distribution in modern times

The U.S. Census Bureau web site Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000 states that there were 1668 individuals with the surname Cree on 1st April 2000. This places it in 15984th position in the country. Since the total resident population of the USA was 281,421,906 (Fast Facts), the frequency of the surname Cree was 5.9 per million. (The web site actually gives the frequency as 0.62 per 100,000 which is 6.2 per million. If anyone can explain the discrepancy please let me know. See the Contact page.)

The American Surnames web site uses official US Census figures for the year 2000. It shows the top five states in both actual numbers and frequency - Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 shows that more Crees now live in California than in any other state. Pennsylvania, the Cree heartland of America, is still near the top however, now joined by Indiana - not a great surprise if you have seen the map for 1920 above. Indiana continued to be the popular state for Crees to live which it had been since before 1880. Otherwise the pattern has little similarity to earlier years. Considering that the 1930s depression and World War 2 have occurred since 1920, it is hardly surprising that Americans generally have shown increased mobility.

The surprise (for me) is the emergence of North Dakota as a new "top state" for frequency of the Cree surname. This could be due to the adoption of the surname Cree by numbers of people of the Cree Nation. However Table 2 shows that this position is achieved by just 41 people named Cree, so the relatively high Cree frequency is due to the low total population of North Dakota. We should remember that in no state in the USA does the surname Cree rise above low frequency in the Guild of One-Name Studies benchmarks.

The map below is from Public Profiler and shows the frequency distribution of the Cree name in the USA (and Canada) at an unspecified but modern date. Unfortunately the frequency ranges represented by the colours are not given, so the map is less useful than it might be. The frequency order implied also differs from the data in Table 2 above, which has used data from the Census of 2000.

Table 1. Top states for CREE by total

State	Total	Rank in state	Frequency per million	Frequency*
California	182	15002	5	Rare
Pennsylvania	178	9375	14	Low frequency
Texas	138	13108	7	Rare
New York	117	17657	6	Rare
Indiana	115	7118	19	Low frequency

Table 2. Top states for CREE by frequency

State	Total	Rank in state	Frequency per million	Frequency*
North Dakota	41	2926	64	Low frequency
Indiana	115	7118	19	Low frequency
Montana	15	10211	17	Low frequency
Pennsylvania	178	9375	14	Low frequency
Wyoming	6	11552	12	Low frequency