Felons and Founders: The New South Wales convict 'indents', 1801-1822

Full description

The convict indentures or ‘indents’ – recording the arrival in New South Wales (Australia) of men and women exiled under sentence of transportation – are a rich primary source for historians interested in both the social, legal, and economic history of 18th and 19th-century Britain and the demography, role and management of modern Australia’s founding population. As the basis of the bureaucratic system used by authorities to identify and surveil convicts in an ‘open prison’, the importance of the indents is magnified by the ‘digital turn’ in Australian History, where the curation of big data (especially via record linkage) and advanced quantitative analysis techniques are generously enabled by the thoroughness of contemporary documentation and bureaucratic surveillance techniques (see ).
This dataset presents transcriptions of part of the ‘Bound Manuscript Indents’ held by the State Records NSW, now catalogued as NRS 12188 (bundles 4/4004 to 4/4008). The current transcription covers 138 voyages arriving between January 1801 and December 1822, thus identifying and detailing 24,111 individuals (including a small number who did not arrive in the colony, being either disembarked before departure or lost on route). Those details (inconsistently recorded in this period) include a convict’s place of origin, trial details, age, trade, and physical characteristics such as height, hair and eye colour, and distinguishing features such as scars, deformities, or tattoos.
Following the UNE method, a unique ID number (“nsw_uid”) is applied to each distinct individual, based on the voyage of arrival (the voyage name and ‘voyage uid’ are also given separately). Further, a unique archival reference is given for each entry (“doc_uid”), based on the discrete bundle, page, and row number of each. Where applicable, a “dht_uid” is given for individuals who are also recorded in the monumental Digital History Tasmania (formerly ‘Founders and Survivors’) database. A ‘cleaned’ version of names is given for easier identification (as distinct from the verbatim transcript). Notes, retrospectively inserted, on tickets of leave and conditional and absolute pardons, are also included, along with other marginalia recording such things as subsequent sentences/punishments and deaths.