"Many convicts are untraceable after their sentence expired"

October 24, 2024 8:29 AM

Tasmania’s convict records are part of the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register along with the convicts records for New South Wales and Western Australia.

The Founders and Survivors Digitization Project is a dataset of life course history generated from the extensive collection of Tasmanian convict records between 1802-1853. The project involved "a mass-digitisation of over 100,000 images, manual transcription of the convict records, XML record matching, volunteer crowdsourcing, creation of a customised genealogical database for population and family history analysis, and statistical analyses." Much of this information is now searchable via Libraries Tasmania.

Results of the project have been translated into a number of educational resources that tell the stories of Tasmania's convicts. The project was completed and is now in "read only" mode but you can do searches on many other websites including Female Convicts Research Centre, Conviction Politics which talks about the political environment in Tasmania among convict, and Claim A Convict so that researchers who were studying the same convict could share data.

Direct links: list of crimes, list of photos, convict life.

posted by jessamyn (4 comments total)

For decades, Tasmanians sought to play down "the stain" of convict ancestry (which the great majority of Tasmanians shared—even today, about 3 in 4 Tasmanians have convict ancestors). My mother used to work in the State Library of Tasmania, and said that one of the challenges it faced at the time was protecting the state archives from members of the public slicing out references to their convict ancestors from original records. And this was as late as the 1980s, 130 years after the end of transportation to Van Diemen's Land.
posted by rory at 9:19 AM on October 24 [4 favorites]

Got a gap in my genealogy that even the Mormons can't seem to fill, and NSW inmates are the most likely explanation.
posted by ocschwar at 10:44 AM on October 24

I'm a Tasmanian convict descendent and in researching my g-g-grandmothers' life and crimes I have come to the conclusion that she deliberately and strategically got herself on the last convict ship to Tasmania because her prospects for a marriage and well-fed life were much better there than in famine ravaged Ireland.
posted by Thella at 1:39 PM on October 24 [4 favorites]

I was just reading a book about that as an option, Thella. I should have included a "via" link which is this pop science book which I am finding is quite good: The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. The author is Australian and talks a bit about people tracing their ancestry in Tasmania (as well as her own journey which takes place in Australia but also in the US iirc)
posted by jessamyn at 5:27 PM on October 24 [2 favorites]