Peter Wilson ColdhamHistorians tell us that a large percentage of the population of colonial Virginia and Maryland consisted of men and women who had been transported from Great Britain and Ireland for crimes ranging from bigamy to highway robbery. Given the unique role of transportation in the peopling of colonial America, Peter Wilson Coldham has made it his task, as England’s foremost authority on 17th- and 18th-century emigration to America, to abstract from every surviving record the names and histories of all those sentenced in England and Ireland to be transported to America for their alleged crimes. This work has been in progress since 1974 and has finally achieved its culmination in the CD British Emigrants in Bondage, the definitive record of 48,000 felons carried from the jails of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland to help populate colonial America.
This CD supersedes all of Mr. Coldham’s previous work on the subject and includes a separate section on transported Irish felons and runaways. Also included is a history of the British transportation system, an exhaustive account of the records used in this work, and a complete list of convict ships that sailed to America between 1671 and 1788.
Based on a detailed examination of previously unexplored records and some recent discoveries by other immigration scholars, as well as Coldham’s own Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614–1775 and its two Supplements, the CD British Emigrants in Bondage may be said to be exhaustive. In addition to a complete list of the names and the alleged crimes of the felons, Mr. Coldham provides a list of sources designed to help the researcher extend the history of every felon named.
To complete the survey of British records, a separate section entitled “Irish Transported Felons and Runaways” has been assembled with the cooperation of many of the best qualified American historians and genealogists who have generously agreed to the use of their published and unpublished work. In this way it has proved possible not only to “rescue” the names of some 5,700 immigrant Irishmen but, in many cases, to link their names with their likely place of origin.
System Requirements: Windows: Pentium®-class processor; Microsoft® Windows 98SE, ME, NT4 (Service Pack 5 or 6), 2000, or XP; 64 MB of RAM; and, 70 MB of available hard disk space. Macintosh Classic: PowerPC® processor; Apple® Mac OS 8.6, 9.0.4, 9.1, or OS X 10.0.4; 32 MB of RAM; and, 40 MB of available hard disk space. Macintosh OS X 10.2.2 or higher: PowerPC® G3 or later processor; Apple® Mac OS X 10.2.2, 10.2.4 or higher; 64 MB of RAM; and, 70 MB of available hard drive space. Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to access this CD.
