CRIME AND POVERTY
For criminal ancestors or victims, Digital Panopticon ( digitalpanopticon.org) provides access to many records concerning 90,000 transportation cases from Britain to Australia. However, the resources it utilises include projects such as The Old Bailey Proceedings Online ( oldbaileyonline.
org) and criminal registers of prisoners on London Lives ( www.londonlives.org/static/CR.jsp), which go beyond detailing just those who were transported. For rolls of honour for members of the police who fell while on duty across the British Isles, visit policememorial.org.uk. For Scottish ancestors, the catalogue of the National Records of Scotland ( nrscotland.gov.uk) includes records from the ‘Solemn Database’ of 19th-century criminal cases, while many published accounts of trials from the Court of Session can be found for free on books.google.co.uk. If you can trace back further, you can find out if your ancestor was ever tried for witchcraft during 1563–1736 via the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database ( bit.ly/scottish-witches).
Poverty, a frequent motivator of criminal activity, was endemic in the past. Peter Higginbotham’s Workhouses website at workhouses.org.uk details background information on the workhouses of England, Wales and Ireland, and the equivalent poorhouses of Scotland, including many free transcriptions of staff and inmates from the 1881 census. Industrialist and social reformer Charles Booth’s poverty maps at booth.lse.ac.uk are also valuable in detailing the levels of deprivation in London in the 1880s and 1890s, and the site provides access to his field notebooks as well, which include case histories of the inmates of Bromley and Stepney workhouses.