'Wished to get out to our mother': convict transportation as family experience

Abstract

While many nineteenth-century families were rent asunder when one of their members was transported to Australia, for others the sentence offered family reunion. This article uses judicial records from the Archives Office of Scotland to recover the history of a Glasgow family in which the mother was transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1821. Over the next eight years, her three youngest daughters would follow in her footsteps through the Scottish courts and across the sea to Hobart Town.