Distribution

How many people named CRYMES, CHRYMES, CRIMES and CHRIMES have there been throughout the world?
How many are there now?
Where are they now?

How many?

Very approximately, there have been a total of less than 2,000 people named CHRIMES, a similar number of CRIMES, less than 1,000 CRYMES and less than 100 CHRYMES.

How many now?

It is an objective of this website to identify - and thereby count - all of the people named CRYMES/CHRYMES/CRIMES/CHRIMES who are alive today. Until that objective is reached, we can try to estimate the numbers, starting with those alive in the UK today. Two methods of approximation are suggested here. Both methods use the name CHRIMES as a example, but are equally applicable to other names:

• The records show an average of about 6 CHRIMES births per year, so using a life span of 70 years gives a crude estimate of 400 people alive at one time.
• There is a very interesting website called WorldNames which gives detailed figures for the numbers of a surname on a regional, national and worldwide basis. The numbers are given in FPM meaning Frequency Per Million. The figure for CHRIMES in UK is 7.36
  Using a figure for UK population of 60 millions gives the number of CHRIMESs as about 420.

Approximate though these figures are, the agreement between the two methods gives us some confidence in them.

The following table gives the UK FPM for CRYMES, CHRYMES, CRIMES and CHRIMES. I have added some other surnames, for comparison, and to illustrate just how rare these surnames are:

CRYMES	0.00
CHRYMES	0.00
CRIMES	6.07
CHRIMES	7.36
CHRISTMAS	36.2
GRIMES	138.2
RUTHERFORD	213.0
JOHNSON	3,274.5
TAYLOR	5,653.7

What about the rest of the world?

The worldwide distribution of the four variant names CRYMES, CHRYMES, CRIMES and CHRIMES differs considerably. See the associated story elsewhere on this website. The simplified summary is that there are no CHRYMES remaining anywhere in the world, there are just a few CRIMES in United States and Australia, there are a large number of CRYMES in United States and there are a large number of CHRIMES distributed across Australia and United States.

The WorldNames website gives the following table of Top Regions of the World for the surname CHRIMES:

North West UK	32.07 FPM
West Midlands UK	17.51 FPM
East Midlands UK	6.69 FPM
Yorkshire UK	4.64 FPM
Wales UK	5.45 FPM
New Hampshire, USA	4.44 FPM
South West UK	3.88 FPM
Northern Ireland UK	3.41 FPM
Ontario, Canada	3.16 FPM

The distribution of the CRYMES surname across the United States is as follows:

Arkansas	22.53 FPM
Louisiana	15.17 FPM
South Carolina	13.29 FPM
Georgia	11.94 FPM
Texas	11.65 FPM
Oregon	10.2 FPM
Alabama	8.24 FPM
Tennessee	6.79 FPM
District of Columbia	5.23 FPM
Virginia	4.8 FPM

Unfortunately the WorldNames website does not cover Australia, where there are several CHRIMES families.

Origins of the non-UK people

As with the distribution within the UK, we need to be aware of alternatives to simple emigration:

• People named CRIMES may have emigrated and then changed their name to CHRIMES
• The name CRYMES/CHRYMES/CRIMES/CHRIMES may have originated independently in countries other than UK, though there is no evidence to suggest this
• People may have emigrated initially to one country then moved to another, eg. UK-to-USA-to-Canada

Do you have any information on specific emigrations?

Distribution by Country

For more details of the CHRIMES, CRIMES and CRYMES within particular countries, see:

• Australia
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• United States

There are a small number of people in other countries, notably CRIMES in South Africa.

Placenames in historical records - should we trust them?

The placename associated with a birth, marriage or death record is usually the place of registration and not the place where the event occurred. If the people whose event is recorded lived in a town, then the place name given on the record will probably tell us where they lived. But if, as with so many of the CRYMES/CHRYMES/CRIMES/CHRIMESs, the people lived in rural locations, their births, marriages and deaths will have been registered possibly many miles away in a town which has a register office. This town may not be the nearest, most obvious one, due to the strange boundaries of some registration districts.
This pitfall is not restricted to the post-1837 registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Another problem arises when interpreting Parish Records: Not every village had its own church or chapel before 1850. Many small villages were part of a large parish, with a single church serving them all. Most Parish Records do not give information on the residence of the people concerned, so it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusion as to their place of residence.
Some examples which relate to the CRYMES/CHRYMES/CRIMES/CHRIMESs:

• This author was born in the village of Norley in Cheshire. The registration district for Norley was at that time "Runcorn", so my record on the birth index gives "Runcorn" as the place of registration . But Norley was (still is) a small village tucked away in the Cheshire countryside, whereas Runcorn is a town (large then, larger still now) which has little or no geographical association with Norley. People from Norley who wished to visit a town for, say, shopping would go to Northwich or Chester but not Runcorn. In fact I did not visit Runcorn until I was 11 years old. So a researcher finding my birth record and concluding that I was "from Runcorn" would be completely wrong.
• There are people named CHRIMES who originate from Great Budworth, which is 3 miles from the town of Northwich. Northwich was a registration district, but births, marriages and deaths which occurred in Great Budworth were registered at Runcorn, 10 miles away!
• The village of Weaverham in Cheshire assumes a great significance in the history of the CRYMES/CHRYMES/CRIMES/CHRIMES name, and rightly so, but we must be wary of thinking of Weaverham as just the village. Before the mid-Victorian period, there was, for instance, no church at Crowton, where there were several CHRIMES families, so Crowton residents had to go to Weaverham for their church ceremonies, which were therefore recorded in the Weaverham Parish Registers. Likewise Norley residents had to travel to their parish church at Frodsham before the first church was built in Norley.

If you are content to know simply that your ancestor "lived in Cheshire" then these fine details will not bother you, but in order to track the movements of the CRYMES/CHRYMES/CRIMES/CHRIMES surnames and thus to explain their distribution we need to know more exactly where they lived - and finding out is not so easy!