"Trace & Explore Convict Lives" -
From (very) petty larceny to high treason...
Further to previous posts looking at aspects of prison
history - specifically in London's
Newgate,
Millbank and
Pentonville (combined
in
online
pamphlet) - SmothPubs welcomes
news
of "The Digital Panopticon" which "follows the stories
of the 90,000 people sentenced at The Old Bailey between 1780 and 1875"
and invites interested people, no previous experience or qualification
necessary, to "help us trace them through historical records, determining
what impact crime and punishment had on their lives." Searching on the
website is free, as
is registering in order to add links to an individual's "life
archive"(or to remove false links).
Starting with a name, the sort of information that can be
found, with luck, may include:
Old
Bailey Proceedings:
Date of trial; offence; verdict; sentence, offence location; offence report;
sentence report.
Criminal
Register: Date of
trial; age, year of birth; height; sentence; description (physical); sentence
report; other notes.
Coroner's
Inquest: Date of
inquest on death in prison; location; verdict.
Transportation
Register: Date
registered; colony, usually Van Diemen's Land; ship; place and date of trial;
term of transportation; register text (transcribed quotation).
Criminal
Indent (details
recorded when convicts arrived in Australia): Date recorded; age, year of birth; colony, term, ship; height;
religion; place of trial; place of birth; offence report.
Founders
& Survivors: Date recorded, arrival date (normally the same, and as for
Criminal Indent); age, year of birth; colony, term, ship; offence report;
previous convictions; gaol report; hulk (prison ship) report.
(Other data
sets searchable at the same time or separately are Prison Licences and Bridewell Court of Governors.)
The range
of information accessible in this way is more extensive than may appear at
first, for example the core records being from the Old Bailey may seem to
exclude prisoners tried in Scotland, but in fact many of these will turn up
somewhere. There are dozens of 'Mac' or more often 'Mc' surnames. For example, two women called Margaret McRae/Macrae were convicted
of stealing in Edinburgh and transported (on the same ship) in successive
years, 1847-48 and 1848-49, so that each has 3 linked records. (Apart from the logistics
making it impossible that they could be the same person, their ages - 21 and 18 -.heights
and birth places - Jamaica and Edinburgh - are different.) Another
couple of Scots' records recently linked are:
tried
Edinburgh Court of Justiciary
register text
"Convicted at Edinburgh Court of Justiciary for a term of 7 years."
tried
Court of Justiciary
trial date
14th December 1835
vdl departure date
15th March 1837
vdl arrival date
16th July 1837
gaol report
"convicted before connexions <[…]>"
tried
Court of Justiciary
trial date
23rd April 1836
vdl departure date
15th March 1837
vdl arrival date
16th July 1837
offence report
"Theft by House breaking"
gaol report
"convicted before 6 months good temper and sober"
hulk report
"very b<[ad]>"
tried
Inverness Court of Justiciary
register text
"Convicted at Inverness Court of Justiciary for a term of 7 years."
(This John
Flett is no relation, as far as is known, to any other Flett mentioned on this
blog).
Incidentally,
occasional blips may occur, for example in two of the records for Lord George Gordon (see
also Newgate link above) where his age is given as 11 in 1788, born 1777
(actually born 1751) although he is described as being 5'11" tall and
having a beard at the same time. He is one of the minority of
prisoners whose names were generally known to history - celebrities, the
notorious, causes célèbres, the rich and powerful - and whose stories may now
be amplified.
More importantly, those of tens of thousands of hitherto anonymous
transgressors and/or dissidents will be accessible to researchers. For
example: Radicals of the 1790s, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, participants in the
Newport Rising of 1839, Suffragette militants, and no doubt many more. Writers of historical fiction, too, could come across multiple sources of inspiration here for authentic original story-lines.
An example of the sort of gem that can turn up;
age 30; b 1815; colony V[an] D[iemen's] L[and]; term 10 years; ship Stratheden
height 62.5; religion catholic; tried edinburgh; place of birth "county donegal"
offence report "rioting and an assault; it was a strike for wages
among the colliers; the men who came to do our work we assaulted & turned
them off the works; 800 of us struck from the workes & 1 man was killed; it
was at ayr, we struck for wages , had 20d per diem"
