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The 1819 muster of female convicts in Hobart Town is extracted from a larger set of muster rolls and land grants for the settlements of Van Diemen’s Land (then part of the colony of New South Wales) compiled in the 1810s. They are now part of the records of the Tasmanian Convict Department held in the Tasmanian Papers series in the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/9yM6gN29).
This section of that bundle, across 3 folio pages, features 199 entries pertaining to 194 individuals (5 people are seemingly listed twice). Each individual is identified in the document by a ship of arrival and the master of that vessel, a place and year of conviction and length of sentence, and whether one was on or off the public stores. A ‘remarks’ column provides vital detail such as martial or civil status.
All have been identified bar 1 (the very last entry, a ‘Mary Welch’ per Friendship, said to be at New Norfolk, cannot be connected to any known individual in New South Wales or Tasmania at that time, and is probably a clerical error).
In our transcription, each row of the document/data is labelled with a unique identifier (Column A), so that all the individuals named can be located to a precise point in the document.
Similarly, all individuals have been connected to UNE’s separate database of New South Wales convicts, their unique identifier number provided here along with a ‘stub summary’ showing their ship of arrival and the details of their original conviction, being the key details upon which individual convicts were (and still are) identified in the records.
In addition, where possible, we have also provided a reference to the Colonial Secretary’s assignment lists and indents (https://stors.tas.gov.au/CON13-1-1) which record the date and means by which each convict woman was relocated from Sydney to Van Diemen’s Land. Finally, we have also noted the unique identifier number assigned to these women by the Digital History Tasmania (formerly the Founders and Survivors) database. In only about a dozen instances was this not possible, raising the possibility of new characters to be added to that database.
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