Implications of YDNA test results for County Down Cree genealogy
The genealogical research conducted by Robert H Cree of Pennsylvania and others has shown that all the Pennsylvania lines of the PA/NJ group are descended from the County Down, Ireland, line or lines. The YDNA matches between these Pennsylvania lines and the New Jersey line mean that the New Jersey line is also Irish. There is also good genealogical and historical evidence that the Cree families in County Down Ireland resulted from the settlement of that area by Scottish migrants as part of the Ulster Plantations of the Seventeenth Century.
The two test subjects I and K (closely related to each other) are English but descended from a County Down Cree. Test subject Q was born in Ireland descended from the Lisburn Cree weavers line (Line 23b). The YDNA profiles of these three participants show they are closely related to test subjects descended from Scottish Cree lines. Other test subjects descended from County Down lines (B, C, D, E and P) are members of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Cree group of lines and so are from County Down also from genealogical evidence. The complete lack of a YDNA match between the PA/NJ group and the Scotland group however means that there were two groups of Cree lines in County Down who were unrelated genetically in their male lines. When I say unrelated I mean that their YDNA profiles show that they have no male-line ancestor in common for at least 2000 years!
This might suggest that there were two separate Cree males who migrated from Scotland to Ireland who were from Scottish Cree lines that had been separate since well before the existence of hereditary surnames. This would imply two separate Scottish origins for the surname Cree. This is illustrated in the following chart where the the two genetically separate Cree lines start at the top of the chart in Scotland and branch over time to produce the separate YDNA profiles of our test participants represented by the red capital letters at the foot of the chart.
This article is an Appendix to the main Review and Analysis articles of this DNA Subsection of the web site.
Related articles:
Review Part 1
Review Part 2
Analysis
My Results
Download file:
Spreadsheet of Cree YDNA profiles
Chart 1. Schematic chart of relationships of Cree lines as shown by YDNA testing.
Key: Scotland Ireland 
USA England
Numbers in green indicate Cree lines as listed on the Lines & branches page of the Cree Genealogy Database. Letters in red indicate the YDNA test subjects. These are cross-referenced to FTDNA kit numbers in Table 1a of the Analysis page of this section.
An alternative scenario
I am reluctant to abandon our long-held belief, which is well-founded in genealogical research, that the Scottish Cree lines have a single origin. A more likely scenario to account for the YDNA test results is that there was a non-paternity event (NPE) in the early Cree generations in County Down (or possibly earlier, in Scotland) by which a male (we'll call him Robert Cree) was given the surname Cree even though his biological father was not a Cree. He would have been given the name Cree because he was brought up by a Cree step-father, who would probably also have had one or more biological sons. We shall hypothesise that one of these was called Billy Cree. The two half-brothers, Robert and Billy Cree, would have been unrelated genetically and they could be the founders of two separate and genetically unrelated lines in County Down, both bearing the surname Cree.
According to my hypothesis the first line, that of our imagined Robert Cree, would be the ancestors of all the Cree migrants to the USA whose descendants’ YDNA matches our PA/NJ group. They would be related closely to each other but not to the ancestral Scottish Cree line.
The second line, that of our imagined Billy Cree, would the ancestors of those present-day County Down Crees whose YDNA profiles match the Scotland group of Cree test subjects.
It is possible, but not necessary to the proposed scenario, that the non-Cree biological father was a McCreery. I propose this as a possibility because Test Subject A has the surname McCreery. He lives in the USA and his YDNA profile matches those of the USA Cree group of test subjects. It's a rare profile with no other matches across the whole of the FTDNA database. Test Subject A was was born in Belfast however, and his ancestry lies in County Down. So this hypothesis is plausibe. But his match would equally well be explained by postulating another non-paternal event (NPE) by which one of his McCreery ancestors gained his YDNA from a Cree male related to the Irish ancestors of our USA group.
Finally there is test subject P, descended from a Pennsylvania line, whose profile does not match at all with any other Cree profile (6/12 markers). His result is a 12-marker profile so he is not included in the fifteen results analysed. As yet there is no other test subject from his line. But the genealogy of the line is, like the other USA lines, traceable to County Down, Ireland. I would suspect that there was a NPE event somewhere in his ancestry. Further test subjects from this line are needed in order to settle this issue.
Related articles:
Review Part 1
Review Part 2
Analysis
My Results
Download file:
Spreadsheet of Cree YDNA profiles