Jonathan Scott chooses online resources for tracing criminals transported to Australia
Tales of enforced transportation have featured in WDYTYA? more than once. The latest series sees actor Lesley Manville discover that one of her ancestors was transported to Australia, just as Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood did in 2017. The system traces its origins to the outbreak of the US War of Independence in 1776, which brought transportation of felons to North America to an abrupt halt. Amid increasingly overcrowded prisons, legislation was passed to establish a new penal colony in Australia.
The First Fleet set sail for Botany Bay in 1787, and by the time the practice ceased eight decades later, more than 160,000 individuals had been transported. Many were sentenced for petty offences – theft and fraud were common misdemeanours – and around one in every seven were female. While most were taken to colonies in New South Wales, then later in Tasmania and Western Australia, many ended up elsewhere, often taken by the masters they had been assigned to as part of their sentence, or moving once they had gained their freedom.
STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND
w tinyurl.com/slq-convict-queenslanders This gallery of convict Queenslanders illustrates the lives many built after their sentence. One James Josey, for example, became a farmer in Opossum Creek, “thoroughly respected as one of the pioneers of the district”. From this web page you can access a dataset of about 123,000 convicted felons drawn from British Home Office transportation registers. This records length of sentence (usually seven years, 14 years or life), name, aliases, place of trial, name of ship, date of departure, and place of arrival. It includes prisoners sent to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Moreton Bay (Brisbane), Port Phillip, Western Australia and Norfolk Island. You can download the dataset, or search it via onesearch.slq.qld.gov.au.
LIBRARIES TASMANIA
w libraries.tas.gov.au/family-history/convict-records Here you can find out more about the approximately 76,000 convicts who were sent to Tasmania between 1804 and 1853. There are a host of free indexes, research guides and finding aids. These include convict-assignment lists, appropriation lists, and documents sent to the Prisoners’ Barracks in Hobart; the page also mentions the collection ‘New South Wales and Tasmania, Australia Convict Musters, 1806–1849’ (ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1185). You can download images of sources from the LT site including ‘Alphabetical Registers of Male Convicts�
