The records of more than 1.4m criminal trials held in England and Wales in the 19th century, including the most celebrated cases of the Victorian era, have been posted online for family historians to trace their more nefarious ancestors.
Among those whose names are listed are Roderick Maclean, one of several would-be assassins of Queen Victoria, who was declared "not guilty, but insane" after he threatened the monarch with a pistol outside Windsor Castle in 1882, and Isaac "Ikey" Solomon, the fence of stolen property and model for Charles Dickens's Fagin, who was sentenced to transportation – not execution as in Oliver Twist – in 1830, six years before the novel was written.
Others include notorious murderers such as William Palmer, publicly hanged outside Stafford jail in 1856 after being found guilty of poisoning a horse-racing friend, and Dr Thomas Neill Cream, one of the Jack the Ripper suspects, also hanged as a poisoner in 1892.
But the records also include more mundane cases such as that of John Walker, sentenced to seven years' servitude and seven years' police supervision for stealing onions, and Mary Wilson, a 65-year-old widow transported in 1791 for stealing a six-month-old baby "with its apparel and one woman's cloak".
Although the records do not include transcripts of the trials, leaving case details tantalisingly unknown, they do include offenders' names, addresses and convictions.
During the period covered, from 1791 to 1892, detailed in 279 ledgers in the National Archives recording crimes reported to the Home Office, there were 10,300 executions – more than one a week – 97,000 sentences of transportation and 900,000 of imprisonment.
During the first half of the period more than 220 offences were potentially capital crimes, including thefts of more than five shillings – 25p, though with a purchasing power of about 60 times that – stealing from rabbit warrens and going about with a blackened face, presumably to discourage insurrectionists.
Those searching for their ancestors can trace the records through the website ancestry.co.uk, with a fortnight's free trial period and then on subscription.
