Researching Criminal Ancestors
In recent years, the expansion in digitisation of historical records used by genealogists and family historians has led to the wider availability of material relating to crime, policing and punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Materials such as criminal registers, institutional prison records and photographs or ‘mugshots’ are often used by archives and museums […]
High Court Records – what will you discover?
It is an irony of ancestor-hunting that you are more likely to find information about an ancestor who committed a crime than one who was a respectable, law-abiding citizen. You may have different reasons for wanting to search criminal records – perhaps you discovered your ancestor in prison in a census return; you are tracing […]