Ancestry.co.uk is publishing 4,400 parole records with 500 photographs of some of the female prisoners sentenced in the mid-19th century. They sit demurely in their uniforms, with white pinafores, some wearing mob caps, hair parted in the middle, hands spread in front of their stomachs: murderers and thieves, some of the latter sentenced to savage prison terms for the most minor of crimes.
There is Elizabeth Murphy, 19, sentenced at Salford sessions to five years' penal servitude to be followed by seven years' police supervision, apparently for stealing an umbrella; Elizabeth Burk, who got seven years' hard labour for taking a piece of ribbon; and 45-year-old Dorcas Snell, who received five years with hard labour in 1883 for the theft of a piece of bacon. The youngest – an 11-year-old called Ann McQuillan – received four years for housebreaking; the oldest, Ann Dalton, 76, five years for stealing two sheets. Murphy and Dalton both served three years before being released.
Sentences were frequently reduced. The online records concern parole licences and show that all 56 murderers listed had their death penalties commuted to imprisonment instead.
