One of the characters I was most interested in when researching the tragic fate of those on board the Victorian emigrant ship Tayleur (which sank on its maiden voyage in 1854) was an ex-convict from Stamford, Lincolnshire – quite possibly the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character Magwitch in Great Expectations.

Contemporary newspaper accounts from the mid-1800s tell of a young man sent to Australia for what would now be considered a relatively minor crime, his return home laden with riches from the Australian Gold Rush, and subsequent reunion with his girlfriend and son. Apart from the somewhat sensational reporting of the ex-convict chancing upon his girlfriend in a railway carriage on the last leg of his journey home, catching her eye and pronouncing I’m the man!, at which point she fainted with shock, there was the rags-to-riches back story of a rogue made good. I looked into his story more and found that far from being rare, the Victorians believed this kind of good fortune common enough to lobby the press in a campaign against the transportation of convicts to Australia and Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania.

I looked up contemporary news articles, focusing on those published in the 1800s. This gave me a lot of information on the motivations and attitudes of people of the time, and allowed me to follow the change in opinion of British society and the willing immigrants who made it safely to Australia as the Antipodes turned from a dumping ground for criminals and the impoverished to a valuable asset to the Empire, where there was a constant fear of the convicts overrunning the immigrants who had paid or been paid by the government to settle there.

The focus was almost entirely on the people being sent away instead of the families they left behind. Sometimes the wives of convicts were voluntarily transported with them, suffering desperately cramped and dirty conditions for the chance to live together on the other side of the world. Those who avoided shipwreck and endured seasickness, a limited diet, and the illnesses that commonly swept between decks including typhus, cholera, dysentery, and scurvy, then had to set up home in an alien landscape without supplies. The kangaroos, crocodiles, snakes, spiders, and scorpions already living there made interesting but sometimes lethal neighbours.

Samuel Carby
The convict I was particularly interested in was Samuel Carby. With a friend called George Bell, he was convicted of slaughtering a sheep after a drunken night out in late 1841, and the local newspapers contain details of the investigation. A local policeman called John Blades actually dug up the footprints from the mud near the carcass of the unfortunate sheep to preserve for comparison with the suspects’ boots. Melodramatic reports of scenes in the courtroom include details of Samuel’s girlfriend, who accidentally gave her fiancée away when she was caught disposing of a lump of mutton she had hidden under her skirt, screaming as her beloved was sentenced to ten years’ transportation with his friend. They were lucky, though, as the law had recently changed from a death sentence to transportation instead.

To find out about tracing convicts shipped abroad I visited www.squidoo.com/convict-ancestor. By following the steps suggested, I was able to find out which ship Samuel and George were on, when it sailed and from where, view their convict records online (for example at www.TheGenealogist.co.uk), read descriptions of what they looked like as recorded by officials on board the ship that took them to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and find out more about their behaviour and any subsequent punishment – thankfully not execution – while they were out there.

The handwriting can prove hard to decipher on the scanned images, especially where the ink has faded or smeared, but if there is a particularly tricky word or letter it is well worth reading other convicts’ records to search for similar words or visiting your local library with a high resolution image and seeing if the archivist will assist.

I was surprised to find neither man had acknowledged their family when asked about them for the official record book. Both men had girlfriends called Sarah and an infant son when they were placed in custody, and were classed as labourers. They provided for their families and there was no official safety net available for their dependants if they were no longer able to do so. A sentence of ten years’ transportation was in practice a one-way ticket, and the shedding of their old lives was a fairly common response. Some men changed their names once their sentence was complete or if they worked hard and were granted a pardon and their freedom, many were executed for further misdeeds, died in accidents, or fell prey to diseases and creatures they were completely unused to. Either way, they were unlikely to return home to Britain.

This changed somewhat with the discovery of gold by Edward Hargraves in a place he called ‘Ophir’ in 1851. It led to the first Australian Gold Rush and prospectors staking claims on small parcels of land, rinsing river water or digging for the tell-tale glint of a fortune. This coincided with Samuel’s freedom being granted, which I was able to trace by searching the Australian newspaper site Trove – http://trove.nla.gov.au/ – using his surname. He earned enough money to buy a ticket back to England and settle a fortune on the mother of his now 13-year-old son. He and Sarah quickly married, and made arrangements to return to the so-called ‘tent cities’ of prospectors with a cargo of shoes and other items that were relatively cheap in England but could be sold for massive profit in Australia. His new wife had moved in with her parents and raised Samuel’s son as her own brother according to census records – this would have protected her illegitimate child from scandal and censure, as well as making her a more marriageable prospect. She gained a reputation for being decent and hardworking, according to the minister of her local church, and helped support her family by making corsets for a living.

Different fates
In stark contrast to Sarah and Samuel’s good fortune, George Bell’s family fell into poverty before he left the country. His son, Henry, grew up in Horncastle workhouse and there is no indication in the records that his father returned to England or had any further contact with him. Henry eventually emigrated to New Zealand with his family, dying there in 1920, and by searching public family trees I was able to make contact with his descendants who still live there. It was amazing talking with the descendants of these long dead men, none of whom were aware of this aspect of their ancestors’ pasts, and gratifying to help them fill in the blanks on their family trees and for me to find out what happened next. George Bell disappears from the records soon after his arrival in the convict ship Gilmore but Samuel Carby and his family’s lives are examined in more detail in my book on the Tayleur tragedy.

As for transportation, reports of convicts known at the time as ‘Van Diemonians’, who left their assigned positions as labourers and servants for free settlers (immigrants there of their own free will) to raise hell in mainland Australia, combined with the efforts of men like Samuel Carby to make a fortune among the goldfields, contributed to the abolition of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1853. He couldn’t have known it then, but getting drunk with his friend that December night put Samuel Carby in the right place at the right time for one of the most exciting periods in Australian history, and all for slaughtering a sheep.

In In the print edition
Read more about the Australian gold rush in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available online atdiscoveryourancestors.co.uk