Kirjahaku

When a genealogist discovers a criminal way back in the family tree, he or she needs to know how to trace that person. David Hawkings here offers practical in-depth guidelines for researching these criminal ancestors, many of whom were 'obliged' to steal for mere survival and suffered imprisonment for the most trivial offences. His pioneering study includes surveys of material held by all County and Borough Record Offices, the Public Record Office, police archives and other repositories, as well as numerous example cases and illustrations, appendices with source material and a case history to show the extent to which one individual criminal can be researched. This unique and richly illustrated book provides the essential research and reference tool which no genealogist, social historian, criminologist or the merely curious should be without.

Almost every family tree will have in one of its branches a railway employee. Railway Ancestors is a comprehensive and illustrated guide which opens up to genealogists and railway enthusiasts the vast range of unique information stored in the documentary archives of the railway companies of England and Wales.It describes in detail the sources available for the researcher and how to gain access to them, giving examples of the many different types of records, and includes (among extensive appendices) the a complete alphabetical listing of all the known railway companies which existed in England and Wales prior to nationalisation - almost a thousand in total - with their dates of opening in each county, and the location of their staff records.‘invaluable to family and railway historians..’ - Reviewed in Heritage Railway Magazine, 18th Feb ’10

The first Poor Law was enacted in 1601, and this system of social security, which was supposed to ensure that those who could not work had food, drink and a roof over their heads, but which is inextricably linked in the public imagination with the cruelty of the workhouse, was not finally abolished until the creation of the NHS in 1948. Being part of the government bureaucracy, detailed records were kept of everything: rate-payers, collectors of rates, workhouse overseers and the staff and inmates of workhouses, as well poor people who were helped to move to the North of England to work in industry, those given assisted passage to Australia and children sent to Canada. David T. Hawkings, one of Britain’s leading genealogists, here explains for the first time how to use these records to trace your family history, providing an important, must-have resource for genealogists and family historians who want to make use of this comprehensive repository of information.

2012 marked the 225th anniversary of the sailing of the eleven vessels of the First Fleet from England, bound for Australia. From the arrival of the first 788 convicts in 1788, to the end of transportation in 1868, a staggering 165,000 criminals were sent to Australia for a range of crimes. In addition to those transported, hundreds of thousands of free persons emigrated from Britain and Ireland to colonies in Australia. Because of the vast distance involved, few returned, and the descendants of many of them now live in Australia. Tracing those ancestors today may seem like a daunting task, with The National Archives alone holding over 100 miles of shelving for historical records. Now completely revised and expanded to include new research, Bound for Australia is the essential guide to these records. By directing the reader straight to the relevant files and providing a case study to follow the stages necessary to research your Antipodean relatives, Hawkings makes locating you Australian ancestors more achievable than ever before. Who knows, you may even trace your ancestor to the victualling list of 788 criminals on the First Fleet.