I have just lost my original message – must have accidentally hit some hot keys or something – so I hope the original doesn’t appear out of the ether and surprise me to death!
I hope I’m not too late with this information, but I just stumbled over the query and thought I could at least tell you of my own experience.
When I was looking for information about one of my convicts I was told about the “Irish Gift” which was presented to Australia by Ireland at the time of our bicentennial (I think). Part of the “Gift” is the Ireland-Australia Transportation Database and that’s where I started.
One entry gave me the information about the man himself, but a further entry showed his wife being given free passage to Australia at the end of his sentence period of 7 years. The document referred to on this entry provided me with information of his wife’s maiden name and approximate age, the approximate ages and names of three children, plus the information that one child had died.
Next came a record of the ship she was “allocated” to, the date of departure, and the document reference was a list of passengers and showed that his second daughter had accompanied his wife on the voyage.
Yet another record showed that their son was also given free passage, almost exactly one year later.
From the Log of Logs and the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence I was able to find out a lot of details of the voyages and the safe arrival in NSW.
The prisoner indents on microfiche provided me with a description of my man, his birth place, age and occupation and date of trial.
His certificate of freedom was also listed on the original database. From the reference numbers provided I was able to purchase a copy, and that gave me the crime he’d committed.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, the trudging through the records isn’t as straightforward as I would like, but the people at the National Library were wonderful and in some cases we went through the learning process together.
I’m still hoping to find more about this family, but need to gather a bit more strength before I tackle the maze again.
Of course this is all very well and good provided the convict is Irish – I have no idea about how to go about tracking someone from another country, but the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence would be my first port of call if he/she wasn’t Irish.
I do hope you have heaps of success in this.
Philippa