Preparing for my upcoming talks, I spent rather too much time creating this image using emojis. There is actually no black sheep emoji, I got him elsewhere.
Visualising Black Sheep Ancestor
Genealogy
The Allure of a Criminal Ancestor
Listen to RTE Radio Documentary: The Murder, Me & My Family Tree in which Dylan Haskins finishes a journey started by his father to discover if he is a descendant of the ‘last man hanged at Wicklow Gaol’, James Haskins (?-1843).
Findmypast releases second phase of TNA crime records
Over 2.75 million new crime records released by Findmypast this week. This incredibly large and exciting collection will be a real boon to researchers. There are over 3.2 million records in total and they date from 1770 to 1935. I look forward to delving into these records, and am only sorry that I won’t find any of my own family in them!
The collection includes the following records from The National Archives at Kew.
ADM 6 Admiralty: registers of convicts in prison hulks
CRIM 9 Central Criminal Court: after-trial calendars of prisoners
HO 8 Home Office: Convict Hulks, Convict Prisons and Criminal Lunatic Asylums: Quarterly Returns of Prisoners 1824-1876
HO 13 Home Office: Criminal Entry Books 1782-1871
HO 17 Home Office: criminal petitions Series 1
HO 18 Home Office: criminal petitions Series 2
HO 19 Home Office: Register of criminal petitions
HO 23 Home Office: Registers of Prisoners from National Prisons lodged in County Prisons 1847-1866
HO 24 Home Office: Prison Registers and Statistical Returns 1838-1875
HO 47 Home Office: Judges’ Reports on Criminals 1784-1830
HO 77 Home Office: Newgate Prison Calendar 1782-1853
HO 130 Home Office: Miscellaneous Criminal Books 1798-1831
HO 140 Home Office: calendar of prisoners
PCOM 2 Home Office and Prison Commission: prison records
PCOM 3 Home Office and Prison Commission: Male Licences 1853-1887
PCOM 5 Home Office: Old Captions and Transfer Papers 1843-1871
MEPO 6 Metropolitan Police: Criminal Record Office: habitual criminals’ registers and miscellaneous papers
T 38 Treasury: Departmental Accounts: Convict Hulks 1802-1831
Witness to Phoenix Park Murders
From late eighteenth century onwards newspapers were the premier medium through which ‘the vast majority of the… population gained most of their information about the prevalence of crime and the ways the criminal justice system was dealing with it’.¹ Historians have always recognised the value of newspapers, but dealing with the large bound volumes and delicate pages meant that overall they were underused. Generally historians searched the better known titles, using dates of famous events to guide their searches. Much remains to be discovered within them.
With digitisation newspapers have begun retaking their place in our knowledge of historic crimes. Of particular interest to both historians and genealogists are the coverage of courts, the petty sessions, quarter sessions and assizes. Court reports are lively and full of detail, often including names, addresses, occupations, ages and physical descriptions of defendants and witnesses. While petty session records survive in their millions and have been digitised², newspaper reports are particularly valuable for cases heard at the higher courts whose records do not survive in Ireland. Digitisation permits users to cross-reference stories across several publications, mapping reactions and the ebb and flow of a story in the press. Digitisation also allows us to dip into newspapers and investigate a family name mentioned in a story. It might be them after all… Read more…