Searching for further criminal records

 

                                            The first Arment family petition submitted after the trial of the two Thomases

It's almost unbelievable how many genealogy magazines I had stashed in boxes and stacks around the lower level of my place. Probably the smartest thing to do would be to take the stacks and recycle them all at once but it would pain me to do so remembering how much I spent on every single one of those imported magazines. While they are dated, they also prompt me to look at various records I haven't checked out in a while. A case in point was an article entitled "Victorian convict records go online". Of course this is not really news anymore because it appeared in the November 2010 edition of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine. 

I suspect that I didn't read about the newly available criminal records back in 2010 nor did I read the article before I wrote multiple posts about my own criminal ancestors back in 2018 which started with  https://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2018/08/ and followed the trials of the two Thomas Arments, father and son, and their co-accused, Henry Samuel Chester. Some of my prized documents from this research are the petitions that family members wrote regarding the accused, the first from the elder Thomas's wife and the rest from the younger Thomas. I hunted those documents down in The National Archives at Kew.

The gist of the petitions allowed me to pinpoint the death of the elder Thomas. But when I read the words of the younger Thomas (if indeed he was the actual author of the petitions sent in his name. Were there clerks/lawyers who edited and wrote out the words of the inmates?) Whoever wrote the petitions it wasn't clear from the text if the young criminal was single or married. After reading the article in WDYTYA magazine, I searched the "UK, Prison Commission Records, 1770-1951" on Ancestry for Thos Arment. In the records for Pentonville Prison > Register of Prisoners > 1849-1850 I was able to find the entry for Thos Arment age 28 which included the information that he was married and gave his wife's name as Harriet and included her address. Now I have another person to track down.

Sources:

Ancestry, “UK, Prison Commission Records, 1770-1951”

The National Archives, Kew – Registers of criminal petitions

Who Do You Think You Are? On the Record: “Victorian convict records go online”