Strange

Australian Convict Ancestor Database

by Jordan Yerman | July 26, 2007 at 06:35 am

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I would imagine that being a prison colony guard or one of the architects of the land grab in the early days of OZ would be worse in modern eyes than being one of the people dragged into the southern hemisphere in chains.

A UK-based genealogy website gained massive ink yesterday as it offered its users access to a complete database of convicts shipped to Australia from 1788 to 1868.

Ancestry.co.uk says two million Brits and four million Aussies "are of convict descent".

If the analysts are right, and CIA world factbook population figures are correct, one in five Australians and one in 30 Brits are descended from jailbirds, so this info could be relevant to a lot of us. It also seems that the First Fleet of non-volunteer Australian migrants wasn't all Brits/Irish: the cuff-wearing colonials also included Yanks, West Indians, and Africans.

"No matter what they did, they're still family," says Ancestry.co.uk.

It makes me think, though. Most of my Australian friends are descended relatively recent immigrants. Some have lived away from Oz for nearly ten years, and still maintain ties to friends back home and further afield: young people in Australia tend to form a sort of rotating diaspora as they go off on extended round-the-world trips, bringing back with them the various flotsam of the jetways. So what is "Australian"?

Oh, and before you even check, Russell Crowe is a Kiwi.