Prisoner Records

I have found prisoner records very helpful, and may have to buy the book mentioned in the Nov 17 newsletter. In particular, I have found prisoner records good for answering some Why's.

Case in point: when I ordered a GRO birth certificate for my great-grandmother's brother, William Beynon in 1886, the certificate came back mentioning Her Majesty's Prison, Carmarthen, as the place of birth. From there, I checked prisoner records on FindMyPast, and found that my great-great-grandmother, Margaret (Lewis) Beynon, had been convicted and sentenced to 12 months for larceny and receiving stolen property, along with her eldest daughter Elizabeth. My sense is that this was a "Jean Valjean" situation, stealing to put food on the table, because her husband had recently died, and she had no family in the area. The criminal record probably played into Elizabeth's elopement, with a married man, to Vermont with her younger sister in tow. It was there, a year later, where Elizabeth's "husband" introduced my great-grandmother to my great-grandfather, and as they say, the rest was history.

Prisoner records have also explained why my great-grandfather's brother moved from Norwich to Bristol, and changed careers from solicitor to soap salesman: (1) "Unlawfully obtaining credit to the extent of L1000 from Messrs. Gurneys, Birkbeck, Barclay and Buxton, by fraud, at Norwich, on the 18th May 1891" and (2) "Feloniously and with intent to defraud quitting England within four months before the presentation of a Bankruptcy petition against him, to wit, in the month of July, 1892, and taking with him part of his property to the amount of L69, which sum ought by law to have been divided amongst his creditors.")

Other criminals on more remote branches of my family tree include a dishonest draper in Lowestoft, and a dishonest bank officer in Philadelphia, though my favorite is the 9th-great-grandfather who was fined and spent a day in the stocks for "entertaining Quakers" in 17th century New Hampshire.