Assessing and presenting data drawn from a nineteenth-century report on the transportation of convicts to Australia / author, Barry Godfrey (University of Liverpool).

Format:

Website/Database

Author/Creator:

Godfrey, Barry S., author.

Contributor:

Adam Matthew Digital (Firm), contributor, commissioning body, digitiser.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Research.

Methodology.

Genre:

Case studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Marlborough, Wiltshire : Adam Matthew Digital, 2021.

Summary:

The system of convict transportation was extensively used by the British government during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to remove men and women convicted of serious offences across England, Scotland and Wales. The system first transported people to the American colonies before the war of Independence made this impossible. When Australia was chosen as a place of penal punishment in 1787, a system then grew until eventually over 168,000 people had been transported to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land (now called Tasmania) and the Swan River Colony (now Western Australia). Transportation to Australia ended in 1868 but left behind a large bureaucratic record about the convicts who were swept up in it. This case study examines a dataset drawn from one of these records, first outlining what is contained in the original primary source - Nominal Alphabetical Return of Male and Female Convicts in New South Wales, 1820 - before explaining how the data can be used to answer key research questions. Like all records, there are gaps and missing data, and some of these omissions are explored, but so are the underlying selection bias that determined which people ended up being recorded in this document. The case study then explores how information about individual convicts might be connected to other databases and sources (details of which are provided) to offer a comprehensive picture of the convict's life before they were tried, convicted and transported, and also what happened to them once they had served their sentence of transportation. The case of William "Billy" Blue is presented in a life-history format, before the case study concludes by offering some further research questions and providing a short bibliography of relevant literature.

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on August 17, 2022).

Publisher Number:

10.47594/RMPS_0151

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.