More research clues for criminal links

                                                                  A ship in Portsmouth Harbour

I have a lot of books in my own personal library. Many of them are reads that I tell myself I'm going to get to someday. That works okay for fiction most of the time. Although sometimes I lose interest in the writer or the subject before I take the book off the shelf. It's the nonfiction that I really should get to. Not that most of it will go out of style. The problem is that I tend to buy books about subjects that interest me, like histories of places where my ancestors lived or events that many have affected their lives. But, every once in a while, I take one of those nonfiction tomes off the shelf and I'm blown away about the information that I find.

Often I need a good reason to delve into one of those books. As a member of LibraryThing that reason often comes from the need to meet a challenge posted on one of the group member threads. Recently, the challenge was to read a book about an empire. One about a business empire wouldn't do. It had to be about a geographic empire. I found an intriguing title on my shelves, Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain's Empire by Graham Seal.

I had a special reason to buy this book, as one of my London based families fell afoul of the law back in the 1840s. My 3 x great grandfather, Thomas Arment, and his son Thomas were sentenced to be transported, a punishment that was gone into in detail in the book. I covered the story of my criminal ancestors in a series of posts https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2018/08/ . Those posts began in August of 2018. I found out quite a bit about the two Thomases before I wrote about them. Now that I've read the book about transportation I have more questions. 

One question should be easy to answer. On page 171 of the book, the author wrote about young prisoners up to the age of 22 transported from Pentonville and Millbank prisons who were treated differently once they arrived in Australia. I'm wondering if the younger Thomas would have qualified as that's where he ended up. A bit of digging in the records I have on hand should answer that query.

As for the older Thomas, he was held on a hulk in Portsmouth Harbour. Until I read the book, I was not aware that prisoners on the hulks were used as forced labour. In many cases, they were forced to build infrastructure in the various places that those old unseaworthy ships were parked. I wonder if his labour was used for any construction at Portsmouth Harbour. I was not aware of that possibility when I visited there. I'll have to look into that further.

It was interesting to find more clues by reading a book already in my possession. Perhaps I should read a few more of the tomes on my shelves. You never know what I might find. 

Sources:

LibraryThing http://librarything.com

Seal, Graham Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children who Built Britain’s Empire, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2021