Month: November 2024

The recent release of around 180,000 records from Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow, covering 1882 to 1899, offers an intriguing glimpse into those who spent time within the walls of Scotland’s largest and most notorious prison. Available on Scotland’s People, these records provide detailed information about prisoners admitted to Barlinnie, including over 2,000 photographs of inmates.

Barlinnie is added to other historical prison records at Scotland’s People.

Edinburgh Bridewell, 1798 to 1840
Edinburgh (Calton) Prison, 1841 to 1851
Largs Prison, 1843 to 1853
Perth convict journals (male), 1867 to 1879
Perth Prison registers (male), 1888 to 1897, 1902 to 1909, 1913 to 1921
Perth Prison registers (female), 1901 to 1916.

Search prison registers use some or all of the following index fields:

• Surname
• Forename
• Sex (Male, Female or Both)
• Age (an age range can be used, for example 20 to 30)
• Year admitted (a year range can be used, for example 1880 to 1890)
• Prison (a drop-down list of all prisons currently included in the index)
• Country of birth (a drop-down list of All, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Outside UK/Ireland or Not Recorded)
• Trial court (the court from where the prisoner was committed; a free-text field, ideally not to be used when searching for a named prisoner)

The search form includes tips for each field with links to more detailed research guides where appropriate. You need to be registered with Scotland’s People to search.

A search for the surname Connery surfaces 31 entries, none for the first name Sean.

 

 

Ancestry.com has added two minor collections that may be of interest to those with 19th—and early 20th-century Irish ancestry.

The first, “Ireland, Women’s Army Auxiliary WWI, 1916-1920,” documents 150 Irish women who served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, detailing their names, birth dates, occupations, and contributions during World War I. The collection, based on the book “Irish Servicewomen in the Great War: From Western Front to the Roaring Twenties” by Barabara Walsh, covers servicewomen primarily from the counties of Northern Ireland (Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone.

The second collection, “Ireland, Paupers in Workhouses Born in England, Wales, or Scotland, 1863,” lists approximately 570 non-Irish individuals in Irish workhouses, noting their names, ages, birthplaces, and poor law unions. About three-quarters were from England, a fifth from Scotland.  The same information is available on the Internet Archive in “Return of Names and Ages of Paupers in Workhouses in Ireland, March 1863, born in England, Wales or Scotland.”

The partial outage previously reported appears to be resolved.

While unavailable, the FreeBMD Database was updated on Friday, 25 October 2024, to contain 291,727,471 unique records, up from  291,560,221.

The years with more than 10,000 additions are 1993, 1995-96 for births,  1994-95 for marriages, and 1995 for deaths.