Irish surname maps

Howard Mathieson, the surname mapping expert in the Guild of One-Name Studies, has been experimenting with a new mapping service. I was one of the guinea pigs who tested his new service and he has very kindly provided me with some maps showing the distribution of the surname Cruise in Ireland using data extracted from Griffith's Valuation 1847-1864. You will need to click on the maps to enlarge them and to see the fine detail. The first map shows the distribution of the Cruise surname with a backdrop of an historic map of Ireland. There are two distinct clusters of the surname with one cluster in Dublin and another around Galway Bay in County Mayo and County Clare. Some Cruise researchers with ancestors from western Ireland have stories that their ancestor was a Spaniard by the name of Dal a Cruze who was shipwrecked off County Clare after the Spanish Armada. The surname was then supposedly anglicised to Cruise. There is a place in County Clare by the name of Spanish Point where the survivors from the wrecked Spanish ships came into land in 1588, but it seems that they were all executed by Sir Turlough O'Brien of Liscannor and Boethius Clancy, the High Sheriff of County Clare. I suspect there is little truth in the story of a Spanish origin but would be happy to be proved wrong. The Cruises in the Dublin area are of Anglo-Norman origin. They arrived in Ireland around the time of the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169.

The second map below shows the distribution of the Cruise surname with the pins overlaid on a physical map of Ireland.

The final map below shows a close up of the distribution of the surname in Dublin.

Howard is now offering a bespoke surname mapping service. He is able to produce maps for England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the United States. Howard can generate maps using his own datasets or he can generate maps from your own data. You can read more about this new service on Howard's Surname Origins website.

© Debbie Kennett 2012

Maps © Howard Mathieson and Surname Origins 2012

Crews and Crew distribution in the USA

Howard Mathieson, one of my colleagues from the Guild of One-Name Studies in Canada, has a special interest in surname mapping and has much useful information on his Geogenealogy website. Howard has recently been working on some mapping tools for the US and has very kindly sent me the map shown below showing the distribution of the surnames Crew and Crews in the USA (click on the map to enlarge it). The main focus of my research in the USA to date has been on the surnames Cruse and Crews, and I have not had time to investigate the surname Crew. In some of the earliest records in Virginia the name Crew seems to have been more prevalent and it would appear that the names Crews and Cruse evolved from Crew in the US. Howard's maps show that the names Crew and Crews overlap to some extent in the south-eastern states but there are some unique clusters of the Crew surname in the north and north-east. The south and westward spread of the surname Crews from its US origin in Virginia can clearly be seen.

© Debbie Kennett 2012.  Map ©Howard Mathieson 2012.

Cruises in Griffith's Valuation of Ireland 1848-1864

Howard Mathieson, one of my colleagues in the Guild of One-Name Studies, has been working on producing maps showing the distribution of a surname in Ireland at parish level based on the Griffith's Valuation Indexes. He has very kindly produced some maps for me showing the distribution of the Cruise surname and related variant spellings. From 1848 to 1864 Ireland's Valuation Office conducted its first survey of property ownership in Ireland in order to determine the amount of tax each person should pay towards the support of the poor within their Poor Law Union. This survey became known as Griffith's Valuation after Richard Griffith who was the director of the office at that time. The survey recorded the names of both landlords and tenants throughout the country in both rural and urban areas, and it provides a snapshot of the population at a key point in Irish history, beginning at the time when the Great Famine was at its peak. It is a particularly important resource because no Irish censuses have survived prior to 1901 and it effectively serves as a census substitute. Griffith's Valuation can be found online on the Ask about Ireland website.

Howard's first map below shows the distribution of Cruise tenants in Ireland. It's interesting to see that there are still Cruises in the east of the country in Meath and Dublin, the counties where the Cruise family first held lands when they arrived in Ireland in the twelfth century, though there has been a noticeable westward drift into Galway and Mayo.

The second map below shows the distribution of tenants of Cruise landlords and therefore provides an indication of the landholdings of people with the surname in Ireland at the time.

Some Cruises still held land in Dublin and Meath, and there were still Cruice landlords in Cruicetown in County Meath. It is however somewhat surprising that the largest landholdings are now in the west and south west in counties Galway, Clare and Limerick.

For anyone with an interest in surname mapping I recommend a visit to Howard's Geogenealogy website which provides a wealth of information on the subject and lots of interesting links.

© 2011 Debbie Kennett and Howard Mathieson

Surname distribution maps

I recently purchased a copy of the new edition of Steve Archer's Surname Atlas. The atlas provides distribution maps of surnames based on data from the 1881 censuses of England, Wales and Scotland. The new version has a number of enhancements including some very useful listings of surnames specific to individual counties. I shall be making full use of the list of Devon surnames to build up my list of surnames for my Devon DNA Project. I've been having fun playing around with the CD tonight and have produced maps showing the distribution in England and Wales of the surnames Cruwys, Cruse and Cruise and other variant spellings. It is now possible to do a comparison of four surnames at once. The first set of maps shows a comparison of the distribution of the surnames Cruwys, Cruse, Cruze, and Scruse in 1881. Cruwys and Cruze are both clearly Devon surnames. Cruse is found across the whole of the south of England, with further pockets in the north. There is some overlap with the surname Cruwys, but the Cruse surname appears to have multiple origins. The appearance of the surname in the north might be a result of migration in the search for work in the industrial heartlands. Scruse is a variant spelling of Cruse and originated in Wiltshire.      

The second set of maps below shows the distribution of the surnames Cruise, Crewes, Crews and Crew in 1881. The surname Cruise is predominantly found in Ireland and the Irish Cruises are distantly related to the Cruwyses of Devon. The northern Cruises are probably migrants from Ireland.  The Cruises in the south-west probably share a more recent origin with the Cruwyses and Cruses of Devon and Cornwall. One branch of the Devon Cruwys family settled in Cornwall in the 1500s, and as can be seen the Crewes spelling was still concentrated in Cornwall in 1881. All the people with the variant spelling Crewes are probably descended from this single Cornish line. Crews is again mostly confined to the southwest. Crews is the predominant variant spelling in the United States and we are investigating the theory that the surname there evolved from Crew or Crewe. Crew is notably absent from the south-west but is widely spread throughout the rest of England.

© Debbie Kennett 2011

Surname frequencies in the 1990 and 2000 US censuses

A posting on Dick Eastman's blog has alerted me to some interesting surname data which can be found on the US census bureau website. The bureau provides lists of the most frequently occurring surnames in the 1990 and 2000 US censuses. A surname must be included at least 100 times to be appear in the list and consequently CRUWYS is not shown. I did however find listings for most of the other variant spellings. I've provided details below of the rankings. The final column for the year 2000 is a count of the occurrences of each surname in the 2000 census.

1990          Ranking   Count
CREWS        1373

CRUSE         3975

CRUISE        7221

CREW          8148

CRUCE        9146

CRUZE       21658

SCREWS    21905

CRUICE     57820

CREWE      73936

2000
CREWS       1404       23167

CRUSE        3874         8422

CREW         7871         3900

CRUISE      9754         3058

CRUCE     14457         1893

CRUZE      20468        1205

SCREWS   24243         969

CREWE     38706         537

CRUS        41060         501

CRUCES   45829         439

CREWSE  49767          396

For the year 2000 information is also provided on ethnic breakdown. As I cannot format tables properly on the blog I've uploaded the data to Google Docs. You can see the file here.

It should be noted that the surname data from the two censuses is not directly comparable. For the 1990 data a sample was taken from 6.3 million census entries, equating to approximately one fortieth of the US population. The report for 2000 uses "name responses from almost 270 million people with valid name information".

I do not include all of these variants spellings in my one-name study because the high frequency of some of these surnames, especially in the US, would make the task unmanageable. A further problem is that some surnames have developed in different ways on both sides of the Atlantic. We have some evidence for instance that in Virginia the surname Crew evolved into Crews. In the UK Crew and Crewe do not appear to be related to any of the Cruse and variant spellings. The situation is also complicated by the different ethnic composition of the American population. In the US Cruze and Crus seem to be variants of the Spanish surname Cruz. In the UK these names are rarely seen and usually appear as variant spellings in parish register entries. There is a still a long way to go before we understand the full picture of our complicated family of surnames, but the DNA project is already proving to be a very useful way of working out which spellings are related and we will learn more as more people with the many variants join the project.

© Debbie Kennett 2010

Surname distribution maps on Dynastree

I've been having fun playing with the surname mapping function on the German-based website Dynastree. The website generates distribution maps based on telephone directory entries for the following countries: UK, USA, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Poland and Argentina. The total number of phone book entries in each country is given along with an estimate of the total number of people with that name living in each country. I initially had trouble using the website with the Google Chrome browser, but eventually managed to get it to work by loading it in Internet Explorer and enabling pop-ups for the site.

The following are the statistics generated for the surnames Crews, Cruise, Cruse and Cruwys. If you click on the surname you will be taken to the relevant distribution map.

- In the UK there are 124 phone book entries with the surname Crews and approximately 540 persons with this name.

- In the UK there are 167 phone book entries with the surname Cruise and approximately 727 persons with this name.

- In the UK there are 350 phone book entries with the surname Cruse and approximately 1,524 persons with this name.

- In the UK there are 25 phone book entries with the surname Cruwys and approximately 108 persons with this name.

It was announced back in February that OSN, the parent company of Dynastree, had been bought by My Heritage.com and that the two sites would be merged. It would appear that in due course the surname mapping function will be migrated to the MyHeritage website.

Cruwys birth maps

I have again been experimenting with Genmap UK and this time I have prepared a map showing the distribution of Cruwys births in England and Wales from 1837 to 2004 by Registration District. As can be seen the vast majority of Cruwys births took place in the south-west of England, South Wales, London and the Home Counties.As London is somewhat crowded I thought it would be helpful to zoom in to give a better idea of the distribution of the name in the capital.The data used to compile these maps were extracted from the GRO indexes for England and Wales. There were a total of 524 births. This figure includes a number of deviant spellings and, in addition, two births for which no registration record has yet been located. The breakdown of spellings is as follows:

Cruwys 497
Creuse 1
Crewys 4
Cruwyd 1
Cruyes 1
Cruys 12
Cruyse 1
Crwes 2
Crwse 1
Crwys 3
Crys 1

See also the 1881 Cruwys distribution map and the posting on 1881 distribution.

1881 Cruwys distribution map

While at the Bracknell Family History Fair at the weekend I purchased a copy of a software program called Genmap UK which will enable me to produce distribution maps based on various aspects of my data. I decided to experiment by creating a map showing the distribution of the surname in 1881. There were only 84 individuals listed in the 1881 census with the surname Cruwys but I have been able to incorporate in my map an additional 34 people whose names are known to have been mis-spelt, bringing the total up to 118. No doubt as the research progresses more missing people will be identified under alternative spellings and the map can be updated. As can be seen, the greatest concentration of the surname in 1881 was in Devon but the drift to Somerset, Dorset, Wales and London had already started. The sole Cruwys in the north of England was 10-year-old John Cruwys, the son of James Cruwys and Fanny Farmer Cruwys, who was staying with his uncle and aunt Benjamin and Elizabeth Farmer. John is from the Wiveliscombe Cruwys family. Thirty-six-year old George Cruys from Barnstaple is missing from the map as he was a stoker on board the Miranda on census night and I haven't yet found a way of creating a red dot in the sea!

See also the posting on 1881 distribution.

1881 distribution

I was reminded yesterday about the Surname Profiler website which has distribution maps and statistics for surnames in Great Britain based on the 1881 census and the 1998 electoral register. The database has a total of 84 Cruwys in 1881 but unfortunately as there were fewer than 100 people with the surname in 1998 no statistics for the name are given. The computer-generated map on the website shows that the surname is almost exclusively concentrated in the south-west of England. By cross-checking with the 1881 census index I have established that there were 53 people with the surname living in Devon, eight in Somerset, six in Bristol (which was then in Gloucestershire), six in Surrey, four in Glamorgan, five in Monmouthshire, one in Lancashire, and one in Dorset. However, Cruwys is more often than not mis-spelt by the census enumerators or mistranscribed by the indexers so the name is inevitably under-represented. For instance, eight-year-old Gertrude Cruwys was living in Witheridge in 1881 with her grandmother Ellen Partridge. She appears in the index as Gertrude Cenings and is the only person with this 'surname' listed in the entire census. I have compiled a list of all the deviant spellings in the 1881 census which are known to be mistranscriptions of the surname Cruwys:

Cenings 1
Crawys 1
Cressys 4
Crewys 14
Crinorp 1
Crunys 1
Cruwys 84
Cruys 4
Cruywse 5
Total 115

Another complication when trying to establish the distribution in 1881 is that many people with the surname Cruwys are in fact indexed under a variant spelling such as Crews or Cruse. These variants have developed into surnames in their own right and it not possible to establish from the census indexes how many genuine Cruwyses are indexed or enumerated with the wrong spelling. I have an example in my own family as my great-grandfather Frederick Augustus Cruwys, who was then a 21-year-old tailor living in Westbury-on-Trym, Gloucestershire, was enumerated as a Cruze. He was a lodger and presumably his landlord did not know how to spell the name. I have also found that some Cruwyses have been mistranscribed as Crumps. I have come across two examples so far in 1881. In Halberton, Devon, Sarah Cruwys, 73, a retired farmer, and her daughter Christian, 35, are listed by the enumerator with their names correctly spelt but they appear in the index as Crumps. In Southwark in 1881 there are four Cruwyses in one household who appear as Crumps. Mary Ann Cruwys née Rutherford, 65, her sons Tom and James Cruwys and daughter in-law Fanny Cruwys are all enumerated under the surname Crump. The entry has been correctly transcribed as the name is clearly written as Crump on the census page so it would appear that the clerk who copied out the page from the original enumerator’s book misread the name. The family grouping is unmistakeable as they are staying with Mary Ann’s married daughter Mary Ann West, 40, and her husband Alfred West, 35.

As a comparison I have included a breakdown of the principal variant surnames in 1881 though at present it is impossible even to begin to estimate how many of these people should really be included in the Cruwys count:

Crewes 84
Crews 528
Cruise 292
Crump 3235 (includes 6 known Cruwyses)
Cruse 868
Cruze 80 (includes 1 known Cruwys)

It is possible to get a rough idea of the comparative ranking and frequency of the surname Cruwys as the Surname Profiler has statistics for the surname Crewes which coincidentally has an identical number of representatives (84) in 1881 as Cruwys but, unlike Cruwys, is also represented in 1998. Crewes is ranked at 19302 in terms of frequency and is used by three in every million people, so Cruwys will have a similar profile.

By 1881 some people with the surname Cruwys had already moved overseas. There were eleven Cruwyses living in Lot 31, Queens, Prince Edward Island, Canada, all from the same family but divided into two separate households. They appear in the 1881 Canadian census indexes as Cruloys and Cruwy.

There is just one Cruwys listed in the 1880 US census: Mary H Cruwys, a 21-year-old seamstress, who was living in Nether Providence, Delaware, Pennsylvania, in the household of Edward Sellars, a bank clerk. No further information is known about her family at present. Intriguingly, however, the census indicates that Mary was born in Pennsylvania, as were both of her parents.

In 1879 Sarah Cruwys (née Harris) and her family arrived in Australia on the Blair Athole. If there had been a census in 1881 in Australia then there would have been a total of eight Cruwyses listed.

In conclusion, although it can be seen that the surname Cruwys is quite uncommon, it is not quite so rare as it would appear based purely on the evidence of the census indexes.

See also the 1881 Cruwys distribution map.