Dear friends of Founders and Survivors,

We have received many questions about the status of our data migration process. We are trying to bring together data from a variety of sources -- such as police records, surgeons' records and death registers -- that have been stored in many different formats and data structures. The process of making these different kinds of data ready for electronic publication is complex and time-consuming.

One source of data that is now partially accessible to users of this website is a copy of the Index to Tasmanian Convicts from the Archives of Tasmania. This Index will form the basis of the entire Founders and Survivors database, so that a record of a convict in the index will contain links to all of the other data we have on that individual. As this index contains over 80,000 records, it may take a few weeks to migrate all of it into this website.

To access the index (as a work in progress), please log in to this website (if you do not have an account, you can register for free here), and you should then find a link to 'Search convict index' underneath the Founders and Survivors banner. From this page, you can browse the data that has been imported so far, and search it according to convict name, ship name or convict number. You can also use the search box that appears at the top of this page -- this will search the convict index as well as information about the project.