Exploring the life-course and intergenerational impact of convict transportation

Abstract

In recent years, historians interested in the mechanisms by which outcomes for one generation might influence the life-courses of children and grandchil­dren have started to employ data sourced from criminal justice records. One reason for this is that they include data for women as well as men (Godfrey et al., 2007; Inwood and Maxwell-Stewart, 2016; Meredith and Oxley, 2015). Police, court and prison recording systems also have the advantage of noting socio-economic variables such as occupation, literacy and height, as well as criminal offending. In this chapter, we describe early results stemming from analysis of data from two databases: Founders and Survivors and the Digital Panopticon. Between 1803 and 1853 over 72,000 convicts were transported to the Brit­ish penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, later renamed Tasmania. Using the rich resources of the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, volunteers have collected, collated, digitised and transcribed much of the information about these unwilling migrants. The Founders and Survivors project which cre­ated this database was a partnership among historians, volunteer genealo­gists, demographers and population health researchers recording the most complete descriptions of convicts when they arrived in Van Diemen's Land, whilst they served their sentence, when they were released under conditions and their lives when they were finally freed.