The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Convict’ s picture that solved family mystery
AVictorian mugshot taken in Perth Prison nearly 130 years ago has helped to solve a centuryold family mystery more than 10,000 miles away in Australia.
Phil Astley, Aberdeen’s city archivist, spotted Catherine Anderson’s mugshot in a 19th Century register of the city’s convicts.
Taken in 1893, it was the first image in the volume to feature a mirror, placed at an angle to show the prisoner’s profile to assist with their identification.
Mr Astley’s research revealed the millworker was imprisoned twice for culpable homicide after the deaths of her two newborn daughters.
The court in Aberdeen was told at the time that Catherine, who was only 18 when she was first convicted, had been “cast off ” by her family and was “living in a state almost of starvation”.
Mr Astley posted the sad tale in a blog, which was spotted by a descendant of Catherine’s in Brisbane, Australia, who used it to piece together his own secret Scottish family history.
The discovery revealed Catherine had a surviving daughter, named Helen, who was taken from her shortly after she was born in 1888 and raised by another family under the name Mary Mckenzie.
Mr Astley, who will discuss the case in an online event during Aberdeen’s Granite Noir crime writing festival later this month, said: “I discovered Catherine Anderson in the Register of Returned Convicts for Aberdeen, which runs 1869 through to 1939.
“Her story is an incredibly poignant one. Although she came from a good background, by the time of her second conviction, her neighbours told how she was close to starvation and the detectives who searched her home said they found no food.
“She must have been in desperate straits to have taken the course of action that she did.
“I published a blog about her last month and I was contacted almost straight away by a man called Paul Sexton, in Brisbane, who is descended from Helen. He said, ‘that’s my great-greatgrandmother’.
“It was an amazing genealogical connection to make and an extraordinary connection to the present day. He’d never seen a picture of her.”
Helen never revealed any details of her mother in her lifetime and died from injuries suffered during the German bombing of Aberdeen in 1943.
Her daughter left Scotland after the war to start a new life in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Family members interested in tracing their Scottish roots were told that no records existed.
But after nearly a decade trying to trace his ancestors, Mr Sexton used DNA to establish a link with distant relatives, and eventually found Catherine’s name among hundreds sharing matrilineal DNA.
Speaking from his home in Brisbane, Mr Sexton, 47, said he only discovered his great-great-grandmother’s identity after he was sent a link to Mr Astley’s blog and read her harrowing story.
He said: “It was family law that we should never go looking into the Scottish family tree – my nana said outright ‘there are no records, don’t look’.
“I would never have known Catherine’s story or seen her photograph if Phil hadn’t written about it. It was like a black hole. My search was made harder because Catherine’s daughter Helen was farmed out to a distant part of the family and raised under a different name. Now I know why.
“I can’t judge Catherine, with everything that life threw at her. From the photograph, you can also see a clear family resemblance with some of the females on that side.”
Mr Sexton said he now plans to visit Scotland once international travel is possible again, adding: “It’s on my bucket list.”
● Mr Astley will discuss Catherine Anderson’s story in a webinar during Aberdeen’s fifth annual crime writing festival Granite Noir, which runs online from February 19-21.