The Digital Panopticon: a guide for genealogists and family historians

In September 2017 the Digital Panopticon website was launched at an international conference in Liverpool, the culmination of a four year project to trace the lives of those sentenced to transportation to Australia from between 1788 to the mid 1800s. The website combines several online datasets to allow the user to follow individual lives from the 1700s to the 1920s. As a result whilst it is another important tool for professional historians such as myself, it is also an invaluable aid for those researching their family trees.

The website can be found at: https://www.digitalpanopticon.org

As it declares on its front page:

This website allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use our site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and to learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.

The datasets include the Old Bailey Proceedings (OBSP), Newgate calendars of prisoners (lists of those scheduled to be tried), and the criminal registers of conviction felons from 1791 (when records began) to 1892. Historians have been able to access these records previously and the OBSP has been available free online for a decade now, but by adding digitized versions of the registers and calendars the ability to quickly run searches on individuals is massively enhanced.

There are also punishment records, so we get access via the site to the logs of those transported overseas as part of a deliberate programme of forced migration to New South Wales and Tasmania. There are lists of capital convictions (detailing those sentenced to death, many of whom were conditionally pardoned and shipped to the new colony), and records of those imprisoned in England, some with photographs after 1871. The site also draws on the Census, that fundamental tool of genealogy, to help build a more complete record of those caught up the Victorian justice system.

This is an epic collaboration between academics including Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker (the driving force behind the Old Bailey Online), the Australian archive service, and commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry and Find My Past.

The site has informative essays about crime and punishment and penal policy in the past and guides to all the records it uses, so it becomes much more than just a set of online databases: this is an educational tool which can be adapted for use at schools and universities. It offers new avenues for research from A level projects to PhD and post doctoral work. More than this the site even has useful sections on teaching with it in schools at GCSE and A level and the DP team are looking to add ideas from colleagues at universities who are beginning (like me) to embed this into undergraduate teaching.

But the most innovative aspect of the Digital Panopticon is the idea of tracing individual convicts, which the site calls Life Archives. For example let’s look at the life archive of William Holmes who was tried for burglary at Old Bailey in 1785. William was listed there as 39 years old, and so his birth date can be traced to 1746. Some records, like this one, require you to link to pay sites such as Ancestry but this is no hindrance to family historians who already subscribe. In certain archives (such as the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell) many aspects of Ancestry are free on their terminals anyway. From the Pauper examinations records for Middlesex we can find out that William:

40 Years or thereabouts upon his Oath saith That he was Married to Margt his late Wife at the parish Church of Saint Clement Danes that he has 2 Children living by his said Wife Oath provided for That since his Intermarriage he Rented and lived in a Houses in Crown Court Butcher Row in the Parish of Saint Clement Danes

The records work much better as the Hanoverian period gave way to the Victorian, and state bureaucracy improved (one of the few occasions I’ll give bureaucracy the thumbs up!). In fact records improve earlier than that as the new penal colony developed on the other side of the world.

So in 1821 we find another William Holmes transported in June to Van Diemen’s Land (modern Tasmania) arriving on the 27thof that month. We learn that he used an alias, William Spelling, as many convicts did in an attempt to avoid detection or the effects of previous convictions being counted against them. One of the many problems genealogists have is in tracing people who change their names or spell it differently. The Digital Panopticon attempts to link records by consistent methods of recognition; it isn’t perfect but they have built in clever technology to identity possible links and weed out broken ones.

Holmes was 27 when he arrived in Van Deimen’s Land and we know he was sentenced to seven years at a quarter sessions court in England. He sailed on the convict ship the Lady Ridley, and his offence was simply listed as ‘felony’. Williams was described as orderly and he doesn’t trouble the record keepers again, while others who were in and out of the convict penal system for infringements of the very harsh rules, come up again and again.

The site uses a selection of Convict Lives to show us the stories of dozens of men and women caught up in a brutal punishment system that affected hundreds of thousands over the period the site’s records cover.

The final William Holmes I looked at was born in Glasgow in 1860. Thus he came into the world just as forced migration was coming to an end. This William must have made his way to London maybe for economic reasons, only to fall foul of the law. We know what William looked like because in 1890 his details were recorded:

He was 5’2¾” tall, had a fair complexion, light grey eyes, with an oval face. He had:

‘Scars over right eye, right cheek, forehead, right shoulder blade, groin, kneecap, instep left wrist, knee and groin, boil scars back neck, pockpitted on belly, P. left forearm (inside)’

William was unmarried and was sent to the convict prison in Portsmouth in 1886 for six years. In 1890 he was released, just in time for Christmas, only to be back in front of a jury at Old Bailey in 1892. There he was:

‘Accused of to feloniously wounding Eleanor Holmes, with intent to do her serious bodily harm. Found guilty. Sentenced to one year six months imprisonment hard labour’.

It is likely that Eleanor was his long suffering wife and domestic violence such as this was sadly all too common in the late nineteenth century as my own work, on the Police Magistrate blog, demonstrates. William was listed as having six other previous convictions in 1892, once you were in the system it was increasingly hard to escape it and ‘go straight’.

So if you keen to trace your ‘black sheep’ or rather those members of your family who fell into crime and the justice system through poverty or happenstance, then the Digital Panopticon website is well worth your time and effort.

Happy tree building!

Dr Drew Gray, University of Northampton.

Originally published at blogs.northampton.ac.uk on October 9, 2017.