2025 Week 33: Legal troubles #52Ancestorsin52Weeks

This story stems from research into what happened to my Irish 2 x great grandmother, Sarah Diamond, when I dug deeper into the lives of the children she had had with her husband, William Boag, and also into the children he had with another woman, Margaret Muir.

Sarah vanishes from the records after 1841 and is recorded as deceased by the time her second eldest son, William, dies in 1855. So I started looking into the life of her eldest son, Thomas, born in 1824 in Eaglesham, where both his parents had been workers in the cotton mill. Thomas had been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith, his mother, Sarah, being herself a Catholic. In the 1841 census, Thomas is also following the family into to the cotton mill as a cotton spinner. Four years later, he marries a woman called Elizabeth Colquhoun in a Church of Scotland ceremony and the couple settle in Glasgow, in the East end of the city. They did have several children, who unfortunately all seem to have died young, as by 1861 the census has the couple living on their own, still in a very poor part of the city and William still working as a cotton spinner.

Life must have been hard for this couple. Five years later, both find themselves up in court for 'reset' - knowingly possessing or retaining property that was acquired through theft. The theft in question was of around 440 small pieces of cloth from a couple of local factories.  

Source: Sheriff Court Criminal Records, courtesy of Scottish Indexes.

Two women, Jane and Helen Burns, had already been sent to Perth Prison for the theft. Thomas and his wife Elizabeth were brought before the Sheriff of Glasgow. Their case went to trial as they both pled not guilty.  At the trial, their defence lawyer maintained that taking small pieces of cloth from the workplace was common practice that the owners knew or should have known about and that the said cloths had been taken away in broad daylight over a period of time with no attempt to hide what was happening. However, Thomas and his wife had been found to be in possession of some of these cloths and the Sheriff and the jury found him guilty of the charge of reset. Thomas was sentenced to 18 months in jail at Perth Prison - but it turns out Perth had no room, so Thomas saw out his sentence in Glasgow's Duke Street Prison. 

His wife, Elizabeth was luckier. She had the additional defence that she was obeying her husband and so she escaped jail time!

Source: excerpt from the Sheriff's summation from the Sheriff  Court Criminal Records, courtesy of Scottish Indexes.

And .. I am no further forward in my research on Thomas' mother! Though I have found another 'criminal' - but that's another story.

(This was the first occasion I have had the opportunity to use these records from Scottish Indexes and it is amazing how much information there actually is, both handwritten and typed up, basically including all the pre-trial and trial documents - a wonderful resource for anyone whose ancestors had 'legal troubles'.)