Digging Up your Roots Top Tips - Crime

Everybody loves a rogue - and if your family tree is full of upright, clean-living citizens who led blameless lives it can be a bit - well - boring. So there's a delicious thrill at finding an unknown family story, a puzzle or a bit of scandal.



A round-up of some of the sources mention in Programme 5

New Zealand has done a good job of getting newspapers online - Ships and passenger lists - by far the best places to go are ISTG, the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild and, for New Zealand, www.genealogylinks.net, with links to over 400 passenger lists



Crime and punishment

www.nas.gov.uk/guides/crime.asp summarises the various courts and where their records are, as well as prisons and prisoners. There is a great website called www.Blacksheepancestors.com/uk where you can look for Prison records, Convicts, Criminals, Outlaws, Executions, Court Records, legal disputes and other fascinating material



Parish details

The best place for descriptions of parishes are the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. There have been three - one in the 1790s, and again in the 1830s, plus a much more recent one. But the early two were written mostly by the parish ministers and they deal with the history, the local economy, wildlife, topography, agriculture, character of the parishioners and a great deal more. You can get these in most big libraries, or online at EDINA (https://edina.ac.uk), which is a UK national academic data centre - but you'll need to subscribe or get fre access via a University , a local authority or some other subscriber. BUT many of them are downloadable free from electricscotland.com, archive.org and Google Books.



Also go to my favourite free site - scotlandsplaces.gov - and search for place names - lots of lovely stuff there, including land ownership, valuation rolls and tax records from the 1790s. You can see who owned a horse and who had a watch or clock!

Digging up your Roots Sunday at 1205 and available to listen again on iPlayer.