According to combined DNA, genealogical and circumstantial evidence that is accumulating as a consequence of the Acree Surname DNA Project, it appears that five documented Acree progenitors (Joshua, William of Georgia, Isaac, John and Abraham) were all sons of William Acree of Hanover Co., Virginia. That man, judging from his sons' years of birth (late 1720s - mid-1730s), would have been born in the first decade of that century. He settled in Hanover Co. before 1730, probably as a recent immigrant from the English/Scottish "borders" area (see below), and soon married Elizabeth Willis, who lived there with her parents. He died about 1767, when he was succeeded in Hanover Co. affairs by his known son, Joshua.
Aside from William of Hanover Co., there were other early Acrees in colonial America who may have been forebears. They lived mainly in the tidewater area of Virginia and appeared in county documents of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Their surnames were seldom spelled Acree at the time. Instead, their names were handwritten or later transcribed as Acre, Acres, Acers, Akres, Akues, Ackers, Akers, Acrill, etc. - inconsistently for the same men, as it suited them or the officials who phonetically recorded their participation in contemporary events, such as court appearances and property transactions.
These early Acrees resided in the Virginia counties shown on the map below (using 1730 boundaries). Unfortunately, as the result of paucity and loss of pertinent records, their years of residence and inter-relationships are, for the most part, indefinite. Approximate years of birth (not residence) - rounded to generational divides (1640, 1670 and 1700) for discernment, follow their given names.
Regarding the two earliest colonial Acrees: The William of Lancaster Co., who died in 1688, was not an Acree progenitor because his descending male line ended with the death of his only son, William of Richmond Co., according to court records. The William of Essex Co. (created from Old Rappanahhock Co.), who died in 1702, is the claimed ancestor of an Akers family line through a son who was also named William; but that claim is undocumented.
The origin of Acree immigrants to Virginia is uncertain. Given our ancestors' ethnicity, they presumably came from the British Isles. Few, however, can be found in available ship passenger lists. Finding them in computer records is complicated by our surname's unfortunate equivalence with the common word for land measurement (acre).
Looking across the Atlantic Ocean for possible emigrants, an analysis of available birth records in the British Isles from the early 17th century to the mid-18th century indicates that the Acree surname was fairly common in Britain. Those records never used the exact spelling Acree. Instead, the surname was written or later transcribed in more than two dozen different ways, including Acare, Accore, Ackares, Ackre, Akers, Hacker and, most commonly, Acres. There is, of course, no certainty that these names were closely related, but those in the same geographic vicinity probably were. Acree birth records were strikingly extant in the English counties of Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, London and Norfolk. So there is a good possibility that, before they left for America, Acree emigrants were residents of one or more of those counties, which are highlighted on the map below.
There is reason to focus particularly on the northern county of Lancashire in the early 18th century, on the hypothesis that our immigrant Acree(s) came from the English/Scottish "borders" area, within the huge wave of "Scotch-Irish" (Scots-Irish) that began to reach American shores in the second decade of that century. Focus on Lancashire would also coincide with the possibility that these Acrees' forebears may have derived their surname in association with the Dacre baronial land holdings that existed in adjacent Cumbria.
Acree family lore has often asserted a Scotch-Irish background, which appears to have qualified validity, despite the inconvenience that Acree (however spelled) is usually excluded from Scotch-Irish name lists. Many colonial Americans who considered themselves Scotch-Irish were actually descendents of English folk who lived in the long-disputed "borders" area, where the contentious Scotch-Irish originated before many of them moved (or were removed) famously to northern Ireland. If our Acree immigrant/progenitor(s) were born in the north of England in the early 1700s and arrived within the Scotch-Irish/borderer emigrant wave that began the following decade, this would, of course, render the Acrees resident earlier in Virginia, shown on the previous map, irrelevant to known descendencies.
Focusing particularly on William Acree of Hanover Co., Virginia (above), he may well have been a British borderer who, as a young man, arrived with companions in the post-1715 Scotch-Irish emigration wave. His bride was a Willis, whose surname is considered to be Scotch-Irish. It is also significant that Hanover Co. is thought to have been a "seed" area, where borderers gathered before they or their offspring migrated southward - to North Carolina in particular. Several William Acrees (of various spellings) were born in Lancashire during the relevant 1690-1715 years, any one of whom may have emigrated to Virginia and become William of Hanover Co.
Moving a giant step back into unrecorded history, all of the participants in this project except one (Acres007) share a genetic profile ("haplotype") that fits within a larger genetic population ("haplogroup") designated R1b. These were initially Cro-Magnon people (first modern humans) who ventured into western Europe about 35,000 years ago and within a few thousand years thoroughly displaced the Neanderthal "cavemen" who had settled there earlier.
During the last ice age, which peaked about 16,000 years ago and forced everyone to move south, our pre-historic R1b clan is believed to have sought refuge on the Iberian peninsula, where some painted lasting cave-art. As the world became tolerably warmer, our clan was able to move back north about 12,000 years ago - primarily into areas that are now France, the Low Countries and British Isles, where they formed stable agricultural communities.
Comparison tables suggest that our participants belong more specifically to the "subclade" R1b1c9, leading to the proposition that our ancestors came to Britain relatively recently, before the first millennium passed, as Anglo-Saxon or Viking invaders. That particular designation, however, is unconfirmed, and the accompanying conjecture is controversial.
Haplogroups are fascinating anthropologically but have scant significance for individuals living today, because they focus upon a minute part of one's total ancestry - the portion that exists at the top of everyone's family tree, which necessarily includes millions of ancestors as a given pedigree extends to the years when defined haplogroup sub-divisions originated. Since then, humanity has become broadly inter-related.
The shaded map below shows where people having the R1b profile predominate today, as the most common haplogroup in western Europe.
by Charles Acree. All rights reserved.