Criminal Records
An Often Overlooked Place to Find Genealogical Info
Even if you don't have ancestors who were criminals, there may be information to be found among the court, prison or trial records of your area.
We all search through our trees looking for that next interesting, notable or even famous person we are related to. But being notable isn't always a good thing, particularly if you have relations with criminal records. Crooks, thieves and other various sorts of law-breakers are going to be found in everyone's past and they can be as fun to research as the law-abiding citizens. Even more so because there will be more documents on their lives for you to uncover.
A criminal past can range from simple accusations, to trials, jail-time or even execution. Different types of issues will come up depending on the era you are looking at. A criminal will have been dealt with differently back in the 1400s as compared to someone who broke the law in the early 1900s.
Besides using criminal records to find out more about specific illegal events, they may also provide more fundamental genealogy information, such as full name, date of birth and place of residence. Other family references are not usually included, unless the person committed a crime against or with another family member. Or if a relative posted bail, or provided testimony, that may lead you to other names as well.
The legal and court system can be quite complicated, especially as you do further back in time when things were different from today. There is no simple or easy way to research these types of records, other than inquiring about them at the court house in the area where you suspect an individual may have had a criminal past. To further complicate the search, different levels of crime may have been handled by different levels of government (state as opposed to federal, for example).
There are a number of places online where you can search criminal records, or at least the indexes for criminal records. Cyndi's List has a very good collection of prison and prisoner websites that you could use to start your search.
You may find information among criminal court records even if you have no relatives who broke the law. They could have simply been witnesses, or even the victim of a crime. It's all in the records and trial transcripts. Criminal records may not be the first place to turn to for genealogy research, but if you have access to them, you should check and see who you might find.
How do you know if you have a relative is a criminal in the first place? Well, other than just browsing the court records in search of familiar names, you may come across news of a crime in the local newspaper archives. That is likely the place where you will first learn that some relative had been arrested or accused.
