Find your ancestors in Home Office: old captions and transfer papers

In association with The National Archives, Findmypast is excited to release an extensive collection of records from criminal cases, gaols, hulks, prisons, and criminal calendars. England & Wales, crime, prisons & punishment, 1770-1935 is the largest single collection of British crime records online. Explore the world of courts and prisons, and discover if your ancestor committed a criminal offence and what your ancestor’s sentence was. There are over 20 series available in this collection. The series can be found on the transcript.

The records in series PCOM5, Home Office: old captions and transfer papers, date from 1843 to 1871. These records contain copies of court orders (‘old captions’) for the imprisonment or transportation of prisoners. These are the papers written up by the trial judge and handed to the policemen who were to take the prisoner away to jail after he was convicted. All the paperwork involved in transferring prisoners is here, with individual documents for transfer between prisons and the records for that prisoner while he was in the gaol. There is a huge amount of detail in these records and it is worth browsing through all the available images to find all the separate documents concerning an individual prisoner. The later records even include a full medical history which is extremely unusual in genealogical records. There are also some records concerning prisoners serving their sentence on prison hulks.