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About This Book

This book is an online resources for teaching the family history of people with the surname McCreary and related spellings.

My Inspiration

I have always been curious about my ancestors. Where did they come from? What were their lives like? Why did they come to America? I knew my relatives came from Ireland and Scotland, but there was no good documentation with references to authoritative sources. There were many sites that promised access to genealogical information, but these were often just incomplete lists of people with birth and death dates. They did not tell the stories of my ancestors. They did not place this information into the context of the times my relatives lived.

The creation of this book was inspired by my travels to Scotland in September of 2025 and my discovery that there are very few free online interactive intelligent textbooks that teach family history. The Wikipeida page on the McCreary surname is also only has a vew facts. I find that a person's curiosity about their own heritage is a wonderful way to encourage them to learn about history.

Intended User of this Textbook

This book is intended to be used for FREE by parents, teachers, and mentors in homes and schools around the world without any fees. it licensed under a Creating Commons license that allows you to customize it as long as you give proper attribution, do not change the license terms and you do not resell the content.

Much of the content and our interactive applications such as map and timeline visualizers were generated by large-language models. We describe this process in detail in our Prompts. The goal is to allow these prompts to be used by other educators teaching history as a quick way to extend and customized the content.

Although the McCreary clan is not directly related to the MacQuarrie Clan, I have also created a intelligent textbook for the Clan MacQuarrie for them. This website also has example prompts and interactive applications that can also be reused if you are building a family history website.

Using This Website

This site has an high quality search tool in the top header of each page. Just type the word or phase you are looking for in the search area and press ENTER or click the magnifying glass icon. Many questions can be quickly resolved by using the search tool. Note that the glossary of terms is also indexed. So if you don't understand any term we suggest using the search function first.

Glossary

We have worked hard to create a detailed glossary of terms. Please check this if there are terms you don't understand or would like more details on.

This site has many links from the main content documents directly to the Glossary. You can click on any term and then use the Back button to return to your reading.

Please contact me on LinkedIn if you have any questions.

  • Dan McCreary, October 2025