Cruse resources

I am very grateful to David Cruse who has very kindly shared with me some of the files and databases which he has compiled and collected over the course of the last 30 years. Thanks to David's hard work I now have a database of all the Cruse references from the General Register Office indexes for births from 1837 to 1900, marriages from 1837 to 1940 and deaths from 1837 to 1930. The GRO indexes cover births, marriages and deaths for both England and Wales. These indexes are the backbone of a one-name study and are a very important resource. It is hoped that in the long term it will be possible to complete the extraction of Cruse entries from the GRO indexes right through to the present day. David has also sent me a substantial collection of transcriptions from parish registers and other sources for the Cruse surname. The largest collection is from the county of Berkshire, but there are also a sizeable number of transcriptions from Wiltshire, Berkshire, Somerset and London. He has also sent me photocopies of all the certificates he has acquired over the years in his research. I am now in the process of collating all the data and updating my files.

Although the one-name study originally focused specifically on the surname Cruwys I found that as my research progressed I was becoming increasingly involved in work on various Cruse lines, and I have now registered Cruse as a variant spelling with the Guild of One-Name Studies. Cruse was the more usual spelling prior to the introduction of civil registration. Some families – generally those with their roots in Devon – changed the spelling of their name to Cruwys, whereas in other lines the Cruse spelling became standardised. Some Cruse families have always believed that they were related in some way to the Cruwys Morchard family, but so far we have not yet had a single Cruwys/Cruse match in the DNA project. Indeed, the early results suggest that Cruse is a multiple-origin surname as none of the lines tested are related.