TRANSPORTED FELONS HANG ON FAMILY TREES

by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, C.G.

English convicts form the largest class of identifiable immigrants to America. Yet many genealogists continue to search for links to nobility and the landed gentry when so many of our ancestors, especially those from Virginia and Maryland, arrived in this country as transported felons.

In England a formal system was introduced in 1655 which enabled death sentences to be reduced to transportation overseas, and two years later justices of the peace were empowered to transport vagrants. Many crimes carried the death penalty, but today many of those crimes would be considered misdemeanors.

After 1655, and before the Transportation Act of 1718, some prisoners of each circuit court were selected to be reprieved from the gallows on condition of their accepting a term of transportation. Each formal pardon, signed by the king, was enrolled in the great series of patent rolls that are preserved in the Public Record Office in London as Class C 66. No doubt some of our immigrant ancestors narrowly escaped the gallows.

Nearly 400 convict ships, carrying 50,000 men, women, and children, left British waters bound for the American colonies where their human cargoes were sold. Most of these ships frequented the ports of Chesapeake Bay where, for almost 100 years, facilities had been developed for the reception and sale of convicted prisoners. The tidal wave of involuntary laborers became known as "His Majesty's Seven-Year Passengers."

Of the more than 300 convict ships identified as having crossed the Atlantic from the ports of London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Bideford between 1716 and 1776, only a dozen or so were destined for the West Indies or the Carolinas, and then only before 1730. Thereafter, Maryland or Virginia were the invariable destinations. A pattern quickly developed whereby the principal English prisons were cleared on a regular basis, two or three times a year, at times to suit maritime requirements and demands of tobacco exporters in the colonies.

The British treasury, which became responsible, after 1718, for payments to contractors in respect of the transportation of felons from the London, Middlesex, Home Circuit, and Buckinghamshire prisons, maintained meticulous records of the numbers and names of those so disposed of and very often of the ships involved. The records of Quarter Session and Borough Courts, which exercised the power in every county to transport convicted offenders, are all preserved in London and in some 50 county or borough record offices in England. However, few of the surviving county Quarter Sessions have been calendared, transcribed, or indexed.

The latest work of Peter Wilson Coldham, author of several books pertaining to English emigrants in bondage, is called The King's Passengers to Maryland and Virginia. The 433-page tome contains names of some 25,000 passengers. They are shown alphabetically, by surname, and in the order of the English cities or counties where they were condemned. Additionally, a comprehensive list of convict "runaways" has been compiled from contemporary Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania newspapers and cross-referenced to the passenger lists.

A separate section is devoted to the later careers, in the colonies, of 20 known felons from England, including Catherine Tyrwhitt, or Territt, as the name is also spelled, who was charged with stealing jewelry. She was sentenced to be transported for seven years and may be one of the few Maryland convicts who could boast of being of royal descent.

The King's Passengers to Maryland & Virginia, is ($39 postpaid) from Family Line Publications, Rear 63 E. Main St., Westminster, MD 21157. (800) 876-6103.

(c) 1997, Los Angeles Times Syndicate