(April) 2011 - Irish Genealogical Website International

_____________________________________________________________ Australian Convict History
Arms and Principal Herald of Ireland dated
18 April 1820 followed by various pedigrees
and correspondence from the Genealogical
Office.
Conclusion
The Sir William Betham collection stands
as one of the greatest genealogical collections
assembled in the nineteenth century.
There are so many valuable extracts and
transcripts of documents that were subsequently
destroyed in the Public Record
Office in 1922 that a researcher can learn a
wealth of Irish history, life and culture from
the collection even if precise details to extend
a specific pedigree are not found. Enjoy
the experience and the beautiful examples in
this collection.
David E. Rencher, AG, CG, FUGA, FIGRS,
is Chief Genealogical Officer for FamilySearch,
a professional genealogist
since 1977,
accredited in Ireland
research in 1981 and
certified in 2006. He
is the course coordinator
for the Irish
Course at the Institute
of Genealogy and
Historical Research
(IGHR). He is a
past-president of the
Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS)
and of the Utah Genealogical Association
(UGA) and a Fellow of that organization. He
is also a Fellow of the Irish Genealogical Research
Society, London.
Irish Genealogical Society International
Transported Beyond the Seas
By Linda Miller
The judge his sentence then to me addressed
Which filled with agony my aching breast
“To Botany Bay you must be conveyed
For seven long years to be a Convict Maid.” 1
The fact that Australia was founded
by convicts is something that holds a
certain fascination for many of us. For the
eighty years between1788 and 1850, Britain
punished more than 162,000 Irish, Scottish
and English convicts by transporting them
to serve their sentences halfway around the
world in New South Wales and Tasmania
(Damien’s Land). About a third of that
group was Irish and fifteen per cent were
women. 2 Not all records on transportation
have survived, but estimates on the
number of Irish women transported are
in the several thousands. After the policy
of transportation ended, the government
destroyed many of the Australian convict
records but, fortunately, many remain. 3 For
more than a century, Australians tried to
forget about their convict past, but recently,
there has been a resurgence of interest in the
history of the penal colonies and a newly
found pride in the people who founded and
built their country.
The British had a long-standing practice
of transporting convicts. During the
17 th and most of the 18 th century, they
banished convicts and other “undesirables”
by transporting them to the West Indies
and the American colonies, to be sold into
servitude. By 1776, approximately 50,000
Irish,Scottish and English convicts had been
left on America’s shores and about 13,000
of them were Irish. When the American
colonies won their independence from
England, the British had to find another
location for penal colonies.
Britain did not have a prison system, as
such, because they didn’t really need prisons.
Over 200 crimes were punishable by death
and those who weren’t hung were simply
transported. They found it an efficient
system and often a permanent solution for
eliminating undesirables from Britain. The
English jails generally held those waiting
to be hung and people serving very short
sentences for very minor crimes.
Complicating the lack of a place to banish
convicts,publicsentimentwaschangingabout
the death penalty. People began to realize
that hanging was too severe a punishment
for petty crimes. They demanded change
and the government responded by replacing
most hanging offenses with sentences of
transportation. The result was an increase in
the number of convicts to be transported and
nowhere to send them. Only those convicted
of the most serious offenses, which included
rape, murder, treason, robbery, theft of items
worth more than a shilling, impersonating
an Egyptian and other serious crimes, were
hung. Impersonating an Egyptian 5 had to do
with gypsies. In eighteenth century Britain,
gypsies were thought to have originated in
Egypt. Anyone who dressed like a gypsy
or engaged in certain forms of deception
associated with gypsies, such as palm reading,
was “impersonating an Egyptian.” The rest
– petty thieves and pickpockets, Irish and
Scottish rebels,disorderly persons,those who
had tried to start a union, who were absent
from their job without permission, who were
drunks, who suggested that politicians get
paid, or who stole fish from a river or pond
– were transported“beyond the sea”. 6
The 18 th century was a time of enormous
social change. The Industrial Revolution
brought prosperity to Britain but it also
brought increasing crime. The cities were
flooded with people from the country who
came to work long hours for low pay in the
new factories. Even children, beginning at
age six, worked in the factories. It was a time
Page 95