Transportation instead of prison?

[NotMyCat]

Currently on ancestry (still!) and a relative shows as sentenced to "7 years" under "transportation"
Where/what would this have been?

That means they committed a crime and were sent somewhere far away for a specific time (7 years in this case)

So maybe Australia or America?

Wow. I'll have a look at both. Sentence says for larceny prev conviction felony

Depending on the date, it could have been transportation instead of the death penalty. In the 18th & early 19th century, the death penalty was imposed for over 200 crimes, including theft of property worth more than a shilling. There was growing opposition to this, especially in the case of children, and juries would often undervalue stolen goods so they could avoid having to impose the death penalty, sentencing the culprit to transportation instead. In 1823, the death penalty was made discretionary except for murder, treason & piracy, so transportation became more common.
Transportation was originally to America, but after Independence, Australia was substituted. The sentences were generally for a term of years, but of course it was unlikely that anyone transported would ever be able to come back, and many died on the voyage.
Someone in DH's family tree was transported for 7 years for larceny, so that seems to have been a standard sentence,

Even though he was sentenced to transportation, he may not have made it that far. One of mine was sentenced, but later received a pardon, and was released after being held on one of the prison hulks on the Thames.

One of my relatives was transported for 7 years to Tasmania. I found the sip records. Sometimes they could stay there or they returned. If they returned there will be a ships record. On return they were usually put in service. This means went to work for someone rather than just left to do as they wanted. My relative absconded. Ironically she recieved 7 years for stealing a loaf of bread. Very harsh as she was probably hungry.

I do a bit of transcribing for Ancestry and one of the projects at the moment is prison hulks, convict transport and criminal records. It has a lot of information about the crime someone was convicted of, their sentence, and whether they were send overseas or had their sentence reduced, or served in the UK.

So keep checking back as once all the records are transcribed and checked by Ancestry they should be on the site at some point.

@TheGenealogist that must be fascinating work! Very jealous.

It's on a voluntary basis. Search for "ancestry world archives project". Familysearch have a similar project for volunteers - with perhaps a better range/variety of records. And UK based there is the FreeCen and FreeBMD project too.

You just do as much or as little as you want - and at present I'm not doing much as I just don't have time.

Both sites will grade projects as easy, medium or hard, and i'd always advise starting with easy projects - that usually means that the source documents are very standard, easy to extract information. Projects in different languages too, you don't need to speak the language to key the information but it obviously helps.

Some od the advanced level records currently on Familysearch are brilliant, Irish church records dating back to 1740, all handwritten. Records may be available on paid sites, but Familysearch do it for free.

I'd really recommend getting involved with one of the projects if you are interested in family history, it exposes you to a wide range of documents and gets your "eye in" with reading old handwriting and knowing what you might expect to find on each sort of document.

I’ll def have a look, spent ages on our trees, had to stop when reducing outgoings due to reduced Covid salary, something I’m interested in.

@NotMyCat Transportation means sent to the USA or Australia as a convict. Australia was New South Wales, Tasmania or New Holland/western Australia.

If they were sent to Tasmania, I know they have huge records for their convicts. They were almost a social experiment in record keeping.

Also try here trove.nla.gov.au/