Genealogy Chat

and they say crime doesn't pay!!!!

my relative stole £10 and ended up doing very well down under

my rellie wrote a threatening letter to his employer!!

my husbands two g uncles where transported for stealing a firkin? of cheese

tough justice in those days

Thank you all very much for that info. There were 2 cousins that were transported, both of them tailors. I will try the searches you suggest to see if I can find them and if not I'll take up your kind offer Kathleen.

That is interesting Ozibird. I never thought of them having previous offences so I will dig around to see what I can find on that too.

Thank you all.........xx

Actually transportation was seen as a judicial reform??????

Previous to transportation punishment was death, even for children as young as 7.


From http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss3/r_hughes.html.html

.... far from being first offenders, >>>>>>>>one-half to two-thirds of the convicts carried previous convictions.<<<<<<<< Eight in ten were thieves, and only a minuscule fraction could be classed as political offenders. Most were citydwellers, not villagers or peasants. Nearly all were propertyless laborers rather than smallholders. Three-quarters were single, and their average age was about 26. The idea of the convict that one might extract from the earliest transportation indents - an old woman who stole cheese, a mere child, a harmless wigmaker's 'prentice, or a sensitive Scottish painter like Thomas Watling - is very far from the whole truth about the majority of convicts ....

The ferocity and scope of eighteenth-century capital statutes created, as we have seen, an extraordinary range of hanging crimes. The erratic mercy of the courts could, and did, transmute such sentences to exile in Australia. Hence, many early convicts .... went on board the "Bay ships" for small, often ridiculously slight, offenses. But after 1815, the general tendency (to which, of course there were thousands of exceptions) was to reserve transportation for less trivial crimes.



From Wikipedia
Thanks to the Bloody Code, by the 1770s, there were 222 crimes in Britain which carried the death penalty, almost all of them for crimes against property. Many even included offences such as the stealing of goods worth over 5 shillings, the cutting down of a tree, stealing an animal or stealing from a rabbit warren. The Bloody Code died out in the 1800s because judges and juries thought that punishments were too harsh. Since the law makers still wanted punishments to scare potential criminals, but needed them to become less harsh, transportation became the more common punishment.

sometimes it could be a little as stealing a loaf of bread , and if they were skilled fit and healthy sent to populate Australia

http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=1590

I think you can search the index and ask for information if you find the name you need.

There are some court cases on Ancestry. If you want to give a name I can see if anything is on there.

Kath. x

Sorry if this has been asked before, but how do I find out the reason/ crime committed for a rellie who was transported to Australia?

Thanks.