It was largely unknown outside of the south-east of County Galway, where the village of Creachmhaoil is also found, until the latter end of the 19th century when emigres established branches of the family which still thrive in Cornwall and Devonshire (where it is frequently mistaken for a variant of the surname Crocker), Liverpool, and London, in England, Newfoundland, Bermuda, Ohio and Berkshire County, Massachusetts, among other places. The surname (rendered Cragwell, Crockwell, Crogwell, Crachuell, Crackwell, Crackwill, Crockwill, Crockwile, Crachwell, and Crickwell) evidently arrived in Barbados in the 17th Century (probably as part of the involuntary Irish immigration to Barbados that followed the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland), (the Crockwells of Bermuda descend from a single Barbadian who settled there in the 19th Century, that spelling now appearing to be extinct in Barbados, possibly as a result of re-emigration). Documentation on the origin of the surname is not recorded, but it is doubtless connected to the village.