First Generation

1. (Unknown) ACREE (^^) was born about 1665 in England, United Kingdom.^1,2 From EARLIER ACREES COLONIAL GENERATIONS: "His supposed grandson, William's, British ethnicity has been supported by a relatively good DNA match with an Englishman named Akers. That William's family, too, probably had origins in the 'borders' area.

There were other early Acrees in colonial America who may have been prior or independent 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. 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.

From PROBABLE ORIGINS IN ENGLAND: "The specific origins of Acree immigrants to America are indefinite. DNA profiles of their descendants indicate that they came from the British Isles, but few have been found in available ship passenger lists. Finding them by keyword 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.

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 Scots-Irish background, which appears to have qualified validity, despite the inconvenience that Acree (however spelled) is usually excluded from Scots-Irish name lists. Many colonial Americans who considered themselves Scots-Irish were actually descendants of English folk who lived in the long-disputed "borders" area, where the contentious Scots-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 Scots-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 Scots-Irish emigration wave. The surname of his bride, Elizabeth Willis, is considered to be Scots-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 or through North Carolina. 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. The most likely prospect was the William "Ackers" who was born in Prescot, Lancashire, in July 1712 to John and Deborah Ackers. That man may have been the William 'Hacker' who is recorded to have arrived in Virginia in 1730."

From DEEP ANCESTRY: "Moving a giant step back into unrecorded history, all of the participants in this project except three (Acres007, Acree013 and Acree029) have Y-DNA profiles ("haplotypes") that fit 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 competing 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 of them 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, particularly, the British Isles, where they formed stable agricultural communities.

People having the broad R1b profile predominate today, as the most common haplogroup in western Europe. Haplogroups are fascinating from anthropological and early historical viewpoints, but they have limited significance for individuals living today, because they focus upon a minute part of one's total ancestry - the portion that exists along the very top of everyone's family tree chart, in our case our strictly Acree lineage. Each of our full trees includes millions of ancestors (though many inevitably become duplicates) as they extend back into the years when haplogroups originated. Since then, humanity has become broadly inter-related. An important aim of our project, however, is to discern where our early Acree ancestors lived in the British Isles. Haplogroup definitions are gradually distinguishing sub-divisions ("subclades") that have emerged within the past two thousand years and are thus becoming more helpful to genealogical research.

In this relatively recent context, our participants who circumstantially descend from William Acree of Virginia have been found to belong specifically to the subclade R1b1b2a1a1d1* - a North Sea peripheral grouping associated particularly with the Anglo-Saxons who invaded Britain following the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century. This designation has been confirmed by "SNP" testing that has yielded positive results for its defining mutations U106, L48 and L47.

Our participants who descend from William Acree of Maryland are predicted to belong specifically to the subclade R1b1b2a1a2 - a Celtic grouping associated with the Scots-Irish. This designation has been derived through the examination of comparison tables of "STR" marker values, without SNP verification.

Several large-scale genetic research studies have focused upon a set of six STR markers having values that define the Atlantic Modal Haplotype (AMH), which is dominant in Europe. The subclade applied to the Maryland Acrees contains all six of those values, while the subclade applied to the Virginia Acrees differs from the AMH in two instances. The subclade applied to the Virginia Acrees, formerly known as R1b1c9, has acquired a further, controversial distinction.

In his book, The Origins of the British, Stephen Oppenheimer, a population geneticist, has contended that many Angles and Saxons came to eastern Britain long before the Romans arrived two thousand years ago and made their major contributions to the British gene pool in that early era, rather than later, when hordes of them invaded Britain after the Romans left. However, calling the R1b1c9 six-marker set within his investigations "R1b-8a," he characterized it as a "uniquely British" cluster with origins in both the Shetland Islands in the north and Norfolk in the south, which apparently flourished in the form of raiders who, acting much like contemporary Vikings while being genetically unrelated to them, spread their seed from Shetland down the west coast of Britain during the Dark Ages of the ninth-tenth centuries, as illustrated by his (modified) map below. This scenario suggests that the forefather of the Virginia Acrees, whatever he called himself, strode into the English-Scottish border area of Cumbria in the early years of the genealogical timeframe, about a thousand years ago." He has Ancestral File Number L2BW-72R.¹ He died in England, United Kingdom.

(Unknown) ACREE (^^) and (Unknown) UNKNOWN (ACREE) (^^) were married.¹ (Unknown) UNKNOWN (ACREE) (^^) was born (date unknown).

(Unknown) ACREE (^^) and (Unknown) UNKNOWN (ACREE) (^^) had the following children: