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Week 7: Outcast #52Ancestorsin52weeks

Following on from the last topic of ‘Social Media’, I am going to continue with the story from 1811 of James McAra, my 3 x great uncle. He was found guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh of the culpable homicide of his brother, Alexander, my 3 x great grandfather, and was’ banished for life’. In other words, he was deported to Australia. A real outcast.

You might think that would be the end of his story as far as my research was concerned. You would be wrong. There were a multitude of records kept on prisoners sent away. Here are a few of them:

  •  Australian Convict Transportation Registry
  • UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books
  • NSW and Tasmania, Australia, Convict Musters
  • NSW Australian Convict Indents
  • NSW Australian Colonial Secretarys' Papers
  • NSW Australian Convict Register of Conditional and Absolute Pardons
  • Tasmania, Australia, Deeds of Land Grants  

From those, a story started to emerge. Convicted in January 1811 to be sent to Van Dieman’s Land, James was imprisoned in Edinburgh, before being transferred to Woolwich, Kent in the July. It is the following summer, May 1812, before he is put on the convict transportation ship ‘Indefatigable’ to sail to Australia, a journey of some six months. He arrives in Hobart Town in October 1812.

A lot has been written about what sort of a life these convicts would have. Those with a trade were encouraged to follow it and settlers owning a 100 acres of land had to take on one convict as labour. James had worked in the iron mill in Cramond and we know he continued his metalwork as he is cited as a whitesmith.

He lived and worked in Sorell, one of Tasmania’s oldest towns, which had been settled as a farming community in 1808, four years before  James arrived. James died there in 1840, but not before he was pardoned for his crime by the Governor, been given a parcel of land for himself in 1836  and saved an important townsperson from being killed by outlaws!  A somewhat colourful life, but not one I think he expected or would have wanted to have. The demon drink that had led him to attack his brother was also given as his cause of death. Recent research found his will, leaving his land to be shared between two daughters of a friend.

All of this gives me a better understanding of the man who had been cast out, not just from his family – he left behind a wife and six children – but from society for his dreadful deed.  The trial report has witnesses saying he was normally a mild man, but one who had been pushed a bit too far. His tombstone is witness to the fact that, even if that may not be true, he seemed to have redeemed himself somewhat in his years as a convict.

(Source: shared by Ancestry member)



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