The 2.5 million records dating from 1770 to 1934 will enable people to find out whether any murderers, drunks or petty criminals lurk in their family tree.
Described as the biggest collection of historical criminal records from England and Wales, they are being made available by family history site findmypast.co.uk in association with The National Archives.
The documents include mug shots, court papers, appeal letters, examples of early Edwardian ‘Asbos’, where habitual drunks were banned from pubs and entertainment venues, and registers from the prison ‘hulk’ ships, which were used when mainland prisons were overcrowded.
The more macabre examples include court records and reports on the Victorian serial killer Amelia Dyer, who is believed to have murdered 400 babies between 1880 and 1896 by strangling them with ribbon and dumping them in the River Thames.
There are also documents on George Joseph Smith, who killed three wives by drowning them in the bath before being convicted in 1915.
One bizarre list of court results from Essex dating from 1896 shows that a man called Charles Norton was sentenced to nine months in Pentonville Prison for stealing five cases of brandy, while an errand boy called George Roker was jailed for only four months for manslaughter.
Paul Carter, a specialist at the National Archives, said the records were a valuable source for historians.
“These records show the evolution of the criminal justice system in the 19th century as the country dealt with the impact of industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth,” he said.
“They record the intimate details of hundreds of thousands of people, beginning with judges’ recommendations for or against pardons, to petitions through which criminals and their families could offer mitigating circumstances and grounds for mercy, and later, licences containing everything from previous convictions to the state of a prisoner’s health.”
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