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Becoming involved
We are looking for family historians to contribute ‘their convicts’ and we are looking for volunteers to follow public records, like the Police Gazettes and the various Pioneers Indexes, to find the deaths of those convicts who did not establish families, or whose families died out.
Contributing convicts
We are collecting information on convicts transported to Tasmania, and their families and descendants. If you have information on a convict, you can submit his or her details to us. This information will enable us to build a picture of the lives of convicts after they were freed, and of their families.
To submit convicts, you will first need to register an account on this website, if you have not done so already. You can register and provide information about your research interests and experience at this link.
To submit a convict, please complete this form, using a separate form for each convict. We will manually check all submissions to ensure that they meet our guidelines for inclusion in the database. Submissions will then require further processing to match other convict data sources and remove confidential information. The historical 19th-century data may be made publicly available. All information about the submitter will be kept in a confidential database and will not be disclosed to any other member of the public. We cannot provide genealogical assistance: please contact your local genealogical or family history society to further your research.
Volunteer research
We know that there are many people in the community who are very skilled at family history research and we are keen to draw you into this national enterprise. The work to be done is probably endless and will keep us all occupied at our PCs for years to come.
For instance, once we have a full database of imaged convict records online through the Archives Office of Tasmania, researchers will have easy access to the Indent records that contain details on the convicts’ families and place of birth. We hope that family historians around the world will start to help us back-fill the convicts’ genealogies before they were transported. If they were transported after 1842, we can usually find their family in the 1841 Censuses of England and Wales, and of Scotland. And if they returned, we can often find them in later censuses.
Finding them in Australia, as many of you will know, can be quite difficult for the first 30 or so years after they left the convict system. Often they changed their name, or deliberately failed to register their children’s births, or travelled to other colonies clandestinely. This is where the genealogist’s skills become important.
Over time, we will place other digitized records online to assist family historians and keep you all up-to-date with new sources.
If you wish to become a registered volunteer, you will need to sign our research protocols contract so that you can have online access to the working research database. You will then become an Associate of the project and be included in our communications and meetings. This associateship will need to be renewed annually for ethics requirements.
Any new historical information we find about a convict with known descendants will be sent to the family history informant.
Ethics and Privacy
All our research is conducted according to the ethics protocols of our universities, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. If you give us information, it can only be used for the database and not passed on to any third party, even another family member or government authority. The data is stored in confidential data storage along with the many databases held by the University of Melbourne and the Menzies Research Institute at the University of Tasmania.
The data is stored in two databases: one with names and contact details that can be accessed only by certified researchers under strict access conditions for the purposes of linking names and entering the core data.
The second database has every individual converted to a number and that is the data that can be used by researchers for population, medical and social analysis.
We cannot enter a convict’s name into the database until we have confirmed that they are the ‘right convict’. Once that is established, we will then contact you with a plain language statement and an approval form.
The Australian Research Council requires that publicly funded databases become national resources open to researchers outside the project team. Only what we call de-identified data, where numbers replace names, will be made available.
Privacy legislation in the Commonwealth and the States controls what researchers and family historians can do with information that comes from Birth, Death and Marriage records (BDM) and from government records.
As a public institution we are constrained by privacy legislation from publishing genealogies on the web; nor can we answer public genealogical inquiries. However, will endeavour to return to our donors any additional historical information we may find about their convicts and family history as far as 1920.
We are confining our research to the records that the various Registrars of Births, Deaths and Marriages have made publicly available, which in Victoria means births longer than a century before the present, marriages up to 1920 and Deaths up to 1985. These are searchable online (see Links) or through the CD ROMs published by Macbeth Genealogy Services.
War Service Records and other personal records are confined to those made publicly available by the National Archives of Australia, the Victorian Public Record Office, the Archives Office of Tasmania, the State Records of South Australia, the State Records Authority of New South Wales and the other state archives and libraries. See Links for the full list.
