Chance to track British
cons sent Down Under

PEOPLE whose ancestors were imprisoned or sent to Australia as convicts will be able to trace their records in a new project.

Experts from Sheffield University will join Liverpool, Oxford, Sussex and Tasmania universities in the initiative following an award of £1.7m to help people to carry out online searches of records of 66,000 people sentenced at the Old Bailey in London.

The work will cover the period from the 1780s to the 1920s.

Prof Bob Shoemaker, of Sheffield’s department of history, said: “The project addresses an issue of considerable contemporary relevance – the effectiveness of punishments in reducing re-offending, by comparing the life experiences of those who were imprisoned with those who were sentenced to Australia.

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“In addition to providing valuable evidence of the impact of punishments, the integrated database will allow family and local historians to trace individual lives across oceans and generations.”

Barry Godfrey, Professor of Social Justice at the university’s School of Law and Social Justice, said it would allow people for the first time to chart the fortunes of prisoners sentenced at the court to transportation from the point of their conviction up until their deaths.

“Visitors will be able to use the website to easily reconstruct prisoners’ lives – at an individual and collective level – by looking at census information, health and employment records and family data,” he added.