Records of transported convicts
From the First Fleet in 1788 until the abandonment of the system in 1868, around 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Around 123,000 of these are recorded in the convict transportation registers, which have long been digitised and transcribed (see here). Around 8,500 of these were people who had been convicted in Scotland. For Australian genealogists, a transported convict is by definition an immigrant ancestor, and often the first person in the family to reach Australia, so they're obviously extremely important ancestors to research. While in the past, having a convict ancestor was often considered shameful, today it's more often a badge of pride.
The transportation registers provide limited information, and it's not infrequently misleading or simply wrong. In almost all cases, Scottish convicts were sentenced by the High Court or Circuit Court. These records are often extremely detailed, and provide a great deal of insight into the circumstances of the cases which led to transportation. So it's crucial to bring these records together, to tell a bigger, often fascinating, story. That's precisely what this dataset does.
This dataset links the transportation registers (HO11 series, held at the National Archives in London) to the records of the High Court of Justiciary/Circuit Courts in Scotland for the first time. The index on its own contains a lot more biographical and identifying information than is found in the transportation registers. Researchers may be happy just with the index, but we are happy to call up and film the relevant court papers held in Edinburgh - just click on the Order Now link for the entry you're interested in.
The transportation registers provide limited information, and it's not infrequently misleading or simply wrong. In almost all cases, Scottish convicts were sentenced by the High Court or Circuit Court. These records are often extremely detailed, and provide a great deal of insight into the circumstances of the cases which led to transportation. So it's crucial to bring these records together, to tell a bigger, often fascinating, story. That's precisely what this dataset does.
This dataset links the transportation registers (HO11 series, held at the National Archives in London) to the records of the High Court of Justiciary/Circuit Courts in Scotland for the first time. The index on its own contains a lot more biographical and identifying information than is found in the transportation registers. Researchers may be happy just with the index, but we are happy to call up and film the relevant court papers held in Edinburgh - just click on the Order Now link for the entry you're interested in.
