- Email: [email protected]
Research note: The founders and survivors project
History of the Family 15 (2010) 467 – 477
Research note: The founders and survivors project James Bradley a,⁎, Rebecca Kippen a , Hamish Maxwell-Stewart b , Janet McCalman a , Sandra Silcot a a
Centre for Health and Society, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne, Level 4, 207 Bouverie St, Victoria 3010, Australia b School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 81, Hobart Tasmania 7001, Australia
Abstract This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival, family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility. Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Australia; Convicts; Longitudinal; Life course; Historical; Cohort
1. Introduction Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context is a major long-term project which is building a longitudinal study of a key founder population of modern Australia: Tasmanian convicts and their descendants. The project is reconstituting Australian life courses, families and generations in the historical context, using a wealth of data from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Research topics include fertility and household formation, life-course and intergenerational health and mortality, social and geographic mobility, and behaviour under stress. The research team includes historians, demographers, epidemiologists and information technologists from the universities of Tasmania, Melbourne, Flinders, New ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +61 3 8344 0716. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Bradley).
South Wales, Oxford and the Australian National University, and the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. Funding comes from the Australian Research Council. 2. Background Between 1803 and 1853, at least 72,500 convicts were transported to the British colony of Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856). From the point of their arrest, in the British Isles and other parts of the empire, to the date of their release in Australia, these individuals were the subjects of intense documentation: a ‘Paper Panopticon’.1 We know the colour of their eyes, how tall they were, where they were born, where 1 The original panopticon was a prison designed by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. In principal it allowed for the constant surveillance of prisoners.
1081-602X/$ - see front matter. Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2010.08.002
468
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
they were sent to work, how many days they spent labouring on the roads or in penal stations, who was sick on the voyage to Australia and who died under sentence (see Fig. 1 for one of the many elements of the ‘Paper Panopticon’). The records are the most detailed nineteenth century source anywhere in the world for family history, bodies and the behaviour of ordinary men and women. In 2007 the Australian convict records were inscribed onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in recognition of their ‘world significance and outstanding universal value’ (UNESCO, 2009). These records, from New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia, capture two populations: a broad spectrum of British and Irish men, women and juveniles who fell foul of the law; and a smaller sub-set who
survived penal servitude to establish lineages that became a significant part of the foundational population of these settler colonies. What these sources reveal, and what makes them especially significant, is the varying impact of the system on men and women. Our initial forays into the sources have revealed, for example, that while approximately 90 percent of convict women married (or remarried) in the Australian colonies, the figure for men was significantly lower. Only one in four of the 259 men transported on the convict transport Duncan (1841), for example, could be traced to a colonial marriage. Nevertheless the overall numbers of transported convicts (until the 1850s they made up the bulk of the colonial settler population), and the relative shortage of women who arrived as free settlers, ensured
Fig. 1. A page from a conduct register (Archives Office of Tasmania CON 33), giving a vast amount of detail about Thomas Newton's life, vital statistics and crimes. This document was an integral part of the Paper Panopticon. Note Newton's unfortunate demise dying from over-indulging in strong spirits.
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
greater potential for longitudinal life-course research across the social and medical sciences than datasets built from parish records. The high quality of Australian civil registration (births, deaths and marriages) means that we can trace convicts' descendants through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Using Australian service records from the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF), we can compare the experiences and traits of convicts to those of their direct descendants who enlisted during World War I (see below, Section 8). The database is an exercise in prosopographical demography; that is, individual life histories are synthesised from a variety of sources for an entire population to enable the study of that population. Diverse historical sources will provide ‘sightings’ of individuals at many different stages of the life course. Where possible, these sightings will be located in historical time and place using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Among other things, these will yield some measure of likely exposures to variations in food supply, to dislocations from urbanisation, and family fortunes. Their very richness, the vast amount of individual micro-level data they contain, and the scope for linking them to other data sets outside of the penal system, provides us with the ability to reconstruct the lives and families of thousands of individuals born in Britain and elsewhere during the critical period of social and economic transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century (for an overview of the scope of the sources, see Fig. 2).
that the convicts had a significant impact on the demography of colonial Australia. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the stigma associated with convict descent encouraged many Australians to obfuscate details of their family past. This has made it difficult to quantify the long-term demographic impact of convict transportation, although these effects have been partially reversed by the huge upsurge in the popularity of family history following the bicentenary of European settlement in 1988. For most Australians convict descent is now considered something of which to be proud. Two immediately past Prime Ministers are amongst the large numbers who have discovered that they have convict ancestry, and at least Kevin Rudd delights in his six convict ancestors as an ‘absolute pedigree’ (Barrowclough, 2008). Thus the convict records tell two important stories beyond that of the convict experience itself: firstly of the societies and regimes that exiled them; secondly of the society that a minority contributed to demographically. Founders and Survivors began in 2007 and is now in its fourth year of building a longitudinal database that will enable demographic and historical analysis of the Tasmanian convicts, their origins, their experiences and their descendants. Having captured the record set in digital images, over 1 million lines of data have been entered that provide critical indicators of the vital statistics and life courses of the Tasmanian convicts (see below, Section 4). The richness of the biological and behavioural data in the convict records offers even
Surgeons’ journals
Physical descriptions
Indents
Local offences
Musters
Abscondings/ recaptures
Burials
Birth, death and marriage registrations
469
Confessions
Tickets of leave, pardons, certificates of freedom, police promotions/demotions, labour category shifts
Invalid depot and pauper institution admissions
Free arrivals
Deaths under sentence
Departures
Fig. 2. Schema of sources for Founders and Survivors, and the relationship between those sources.
470
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
3. Historical cohort studies Longitudinal population and cohort studies are now central to the understanding of population health, social and economic analysis and policy formation. Until recently, historical, multi-generational datasets were fewer and more difficult to construct due to lack of past records. However, the International Commission for Historical Demography reveals that there are now at least twenty projects, from Europe and Scandinavia, to North America and Australasia, all attempting to create this type of database. Some of the great historical and contemporary datasets of the world are from Sweden, in particular the Umeå Population Database constructed from Swedish annual parish registers kept from the 1700s (Edvinsson, 2000). The Umeå Database provides long-run demographic and socio-economic data, which enables investigations into multi-generational effects of external stressors such as climate change, periodic famine, economic stress and infectious diseases. The unique identifier given each Swedish citizen allows linkage between historical records and more contemporary records, providing (under strict protocols of privacy) data that are used by researchers from around the world. Other studies include Projet Balsac (Bouchard, 2010), a reconstitution of the Quebecois population based on the French settlers' parish registers. The Historical Sample of the Netherlands was established to create a representative dataset of individual level data collected from ‘birth certificates, death certificates, personal cards, marriage certificates and population registers’. The sample of 78,000 individuals from the birth period 1812–1922 not only offers a resource to scholars for their own research, but also provides a control group against which other studies can be measured and compared (Mandemakers, 2000). More recently Mandemakers and his team have instituted the LINKs project which aims to provide a tool allowing the enrichment and linkage of data from the GENLIAS project, which is digitising 32 million Dutch birth, death and marriage certificates from 1811 to the early twentieth century (Mandemakers, 2008). In the United Kingdom, the Cambridge Population Group used parish registers and volunteer genealogists to reconstitute a sample of the English population in the eighteenth century, before civil registration began in 1837 (Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, & Schofield, 1997). George Davey Smith and Steven Frankel have resuscitated the Boyd-Orr cohort first studied in Scotland in the late 1930s (Martin, Gunnell, Pemberton, Frankell, & Davey Smith, 2005). More recently Schürer and Higgs, at the
University of Essex, have been funded to produce the Integrated Census Microdata project, which aims to standardise UK census micro-data producing a longitudinal database of individuals and households between 1851–1911 (Higgs, 2010). This will be the first stage of the Victorian Panel Study as envisaged by Schürer (Schürer, 2007). In the United States, datasets include the Union Army Sample–used by Robert Fogel, for the investigation of ageing (Fogel, 2004), and by Dora Costa and many others for a wide range of studies (Costa, 1993; Costa & Kahn, 2008; Hacker, 2009)–and the Utah Population Database, which covers up to eleven generations and is used to research genetic disease propensity, links between fertility and longevity and early-life impacts on later-life mortality (Mineau, 2009). The United States is also home to the biggest longitudinal micro-data project, the University of Minnesota's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, which has standardised census data from 55 countries, covering 158 censuses, in the process creating 325 million records relating to individuals and households. Founders and Survivors is thus part of a wider group of studies that seek to track the life courses of ordinary people and their descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The research team collaborates with and draws on the expertise of colleagues associated with these other projects, especially the Umeå Population Database. 4. Data In the first year of Founders and Survivors, 354 volumes of convict records–a total of over 68,000 images–were digitally captured for research purposes. Copies of these are now available through the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office website and can be accessed on line (http://www.archives.tas.gov. au/generic/convict-records-online). To date, the following data have been collected: 1. 9,000 deaths for convicts under sentence; 7,000 burials for the colonial population as a whole (for the period 1803–38); 195,000 births, 93,000 deaths and 51,000 marriages registered in Tasmania for the period (1838–99). 2. 12,000 records for convicts, crew, soldiers and their families treated by ships' surgeons during the voyage to Australia (1818–53). 3. 37,900 physical descriptions of the convicts (c. 50% of the men, and c.100% of the women), including height, and distinguishing features; 37,000 indents
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
(out of c. 70,000) listing, amongst other things, places of trial, sentence, occupations and literacy; 38,700 confessions (including a few protestations of innocence), including details of prior offences and behaviour under sentence prior to disembarkation in Tasmania (all covering 1816–53). 25,900 offences for which convicts were tried before magistrates benches in Tasmania between 1816–80 (recording all the offences of a 1:25 systematic sample of the male convicts), including the punishments awarded. All surviving 49,000 muster records providing the location to which each convict was assigned (1830– 35). All 68,700 of the absconding and recapture notices published in the government Gazette, a weekly publication that printed and distributed official notices and information; all 220,000 Gazette notifications of tickets of leave, pardons, certificates of freedom and promotions and demotions from the police; and all 23,700 Gazette probation class notifications recording the movement of prisoners between different labour categories. 42,000 free arrivals to Tasmania and 114,500 departures for free people, including convicts free by servitude, in the period to 1860. 20,000 admissions to invalid depots and pauper institutions, 1880–1920.
This totals 1,044,400 records collected, cleaned, and transcribed. Because transcriptions are linked in many cases to images of the original source, the data are textual, visual and numerical. The next task will be linkage of these records, internally, and to other collections including the civil registration records of other colonies, United Kingdom census data, and the Old Bailey records. This linkage will allow us to reconstitute life courses, families and generations. Future steps include transcribing and linking to the service records of descendants who served in the First Australian Imperial Force (World War I) and their veteran medical records (under strict medical-ethics protocols). 5. Text encoding initiative and data handling A core technology for Founders and Survivors is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI schema for encoding information about individuals and social contexts is being used to encode and aggregate all of the diverse historical sources about Tasmanian convicts and their descendants. The TEI is a collaborative project
471
that has evolved over twenty years into an international and interdisciplinary standard, based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). TEI is widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching. The TEI consortium is an international non-profit organisation of TEI users whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and historical texts (see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml). In recent years the TEI standard has evolved to enable the encoding of persons, places, events, dates, complex personal and social relationships, and data about populations. The decision to use the TEI has the following important implications for this project: • all data is stored in an open, non-proprietary, nonbinary, accessible (computer and human-readable) standard format using XML, which can be easily presented by web-browsers; • all the TEI files incorporate metadata and semantic description of the encoded data, meaning that documentation and metadata are always available with the core data; • reuse in other contexts is enhanced because TEI person, organisation, place, event, state and trait element encodings are powerful enough to act as a generic ‘normalised’ format (that is, common and reusable); • TEI enables data to be mapped to facsimiles (images) in flexible ways, even enabling zones within images to be associated with data transcribed from them; • the project benefits from the wealth of freely accessible tools for the processing of XML and TEI data (e.g. visualisation tools such as BaseX http:// www.basex.org/, TEI transformation scripts and stylesheets); • data content and presentation are separated, again facilitating reuse (Liu, 2004; Spurger-McQueen & Burnard, 2003). This last point is critical. By separating the data from its presentation we are able to overcome one of the fundamental problems faced by projects constructing historical databases: the conflict between retaining the structural integrity of the original source, with the need to restructure the original source in such a way that information may be transformed into data and data into well-founded conclusions. Thus, in historical computing it has long been a trope that a database should replicate the original source as closely as possible, recording misspellings, data out of place, and all the other messes
472
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
that we associate with historical sources: or as Mandemakers and Dillon put it, ‘the data-entry process should preclude the necessity of further inspection of the original primary source’, in other words ‘literal transcription’ (Mandemakers & Dillon, 2001). It is maintained that this proximity to the source allows for more effective error checking, but more importantly makes the data re-usable (Harbor, 2008). However, because it is hard to replicate the complexities of an archival document the temptation has always been to enclose the data within a structure that allows for easy analysis; often the more structured a database was the further from the original source it had travelled. The XML-based TEI gives these types of projects a new model, where the document can be closely replicated using mark-up that identifies not only the data entities, but also the attributes of those entities. Furthermore, because mark-up provides bounded-fields, it is possible to copy, rather than extract, those fields into a Relational Database Management System, allowing for traditional data analysis. Thus by maintaining the source's integrity, while opening up the source to structured analysis, we effectively address many of the important parts of the ‘life-cycle of historical information’ (Boonstra, Breure, & Doorn, 2004). This model has been advocated and trialled by a number of scholars (Spaeth, 2004; Bradley, 2005; Bradley & Short, 2005), and the award-winning website, Old Bailey Online, implemented such a system. Indeed, the Old Bailey's publicly available statistical functions are based upon an XML-to-RDBMS system. The technical developers of Founders and Survivors have designed and piloted a more advanced system, and demonstrated its feasibility for handling vast amounts of data.
6. Linkage Linkage of data about the same person, and intergenerational linkage (family trees), is managed by highly specialised link-management software (Holman, Bass, Rouse, & Hobbs, 1999). Through use of this software, the project's researchers can access aggregated data about individuals and populations without losing track of the diversity of sources from which the data are derived. Keeping link-management separate from the data enables straightforward corrections and additions to links to be made. By enabling full transparency and retaining a history of the matching/linking process, team members can clearly trace and detect any potential biases or censorings introduced as the nominal matching and genealogical linkage progresses. This level of
absolute transparency is required to support defensible generalised interpretations of population data. Various strategies are being employed to automate nominal data linkages. This process involves the consistent handling of the naming of identities across sources by using standardised TEI formats for prosopographical representations of names, dates and places. TEI easily allows for flexible but common representations of multiple names and name parts, and allows recording at source for soundex codes (or other name standardisation software routines), known aliases and other normalised spelling/stemming of names. Matching software will be specifically designed to process these TEI standardised names and name parts. Linkage of convict data within the system is straightforward. The paper Panopticon used a rigorously applied identification system, which allowed the linkage of convicts between the different records: each convict was given a unique identifying police number that was used as the primary index. Outside of the paper Panopticon, convict names (first, middle and family), ship name and date of arrival were the most commonly used identifiers, and form the principal basis for linking convicts to their descendants in the colonial birth, death and marriage records. Using these, with the addition of other variables (like occupation) to ensure a high confidence in the links, the process has now commenced. Australian governments may have been poor custodians of census returns–almost none remain from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hull, 2007)–but the colonial governments, especially in Tasmania and Victoria, were advanced for their time in the administration of civil registration of births, deaths and marriages. Tasmanian civil registration began in 1838, just a year after it did in England and Wales, and the system instituted in Victoria in 1853 remains among the most detailed registration system in the world. These will allow us to reconstruct rich family histories. Previous historical cohort studies have incorporated the voluntary research of family historians. This project likewise offers opportunities for a meaningful collaboration between university researchers and the community. Family historians can provide access to family birth, death and marriage records, and will enable us to identify retrospectively many convicts who changed their names. Such collaboration will also provide an opportunity to test the results of automated record linkage against a large sample of manually linked records, a process that will enable the project to estimate the proportion of false positives achieved under various automated linkage procedures.
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
7. Community involvement, ethics and privacy To maintain and encourage public participation, the project has a high level of community engagement. This is achieved through newspaper articles (Barlow, 2009; Farouque, 2009), national radio coverage (MaxwellStewart & McCalman, 2010), presentations to Australian family history groups, articles in family history publications (McCalman, 2009a,b,c), the project website (www.foundersandsurvivors.org), and a quarterly project newsletter Chainletter (www.foundersandsurvivors.org/ newsletter). Thus far, recognising the unique skills base and experiences of family historians, the project has recruited more than 400 volunteers to aid the work of tracing convicts and their descendants. Nevertheless, the involvement of family historians, particularly as the donors of detailed family trees, has required the development of privacy protocols. The work of Founders and Survivors is by necessity conducted according to the ethics protocols of the participating universities, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. The genealogies and other family information donated to the project can only be used for the database and not passed on to any third party, even another family member or government authority. The data is stored in secure and confidential data storage along with the many databases held by the University of Melbourne and the Menzies Research Institute at the University of Tasmania. The data is stored in two databases: one with names and contact details that can be accessed only by certified researchers under strict access conditions for the purposes of linking names and entering the core data. The second has every individual converted to a number, and this is the database that will be used by researchers for population, medical and social analysis. Equally, as the Australian Research Council requires publicly funded databases to become nation resources open to researchers outside the project team, it is only the second, de-identified data, that will be made available in the public domain (for more information see http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/plans). 8. Research questions There are two critical research questions that can and will be investigated. The first relates to life-course analysis, and focuses upon human resilience and the impact of insults suffered at critical periods of the lifecourse upon survival and human social performance. This question is developed from the work on sickness by Riley, Davey Smith, Kuh and others (Riley, 1989; Kuh
473
& Davey Smith, 1993; Galobardes, Lynch, & Davey Smith, 2004; Lynch & Davey Smith, 2005). The second converges upon the intergenerational effects and influences of the convict experience. While historical life-course analysis is perforce limited to human measurement in height, life span, fertility, socioeconomic status, causes of death, it has the potential to complement life-course analysis that has access to genetic data. All these human measurements can be plotted against historical exposures: epidemics, famine, war trauma and socio-economic change. Nutritional status in childhood can be inferred from adult height calibrated against historical geographic data when the time and location of birth and childhood are known and there is an adequate denominator population for a cohort (Bygren, Edvinsson, & Brostrom, 2000;Bygren, Gunnar, & Edvinsson, 2001). In the case of the convicts and their AIF-descendants (colloquially referred to as “diggers”), sufficient data may be obtained by linking convict indents to census data, and military attestation papers with civil registration, to assess family ‘integrity’ in childhood and adolescence, particularly absence of parents, homelessness, destitution, siblings, and socioeconomic status. The study of intergenerational effects is possible because we can construct cradle-to-grave studies of a sample of soldiers who served in World War I from their military and pension/health records. They can then be linked back to direct male and female convict ancestors. Our partner in this research is the Menzies Centre for Population Research at the University of Tasmania, which already has an intergenerational genetic database built from 10,000 founding families of the 1840s (Dwyer, 2001). Founders and Survivors will be able to provide the Menzies' genetic database with an identified sub-population that can be traced backwards to their descriptions in the convict archive and forwards to the diggers' records. We are collecting data on eyecolour, for instance, for the Menzies researchers. There are distinctive characteristics about this convict population and their experience. First, the vast majority of convicts were poor; second, their experience and stressors were minutely recorded; third, their care was under medical superintendence that left a record; fourth, unlike slaves, their servitude could result in freedom and rehabilitation; fifth, their behaviour in response to stress was recorded; and finally, if they did not suffer the privations of secondary punishment (which a majority did not), the penal system invested in them biologically with high-calorie working diets, and in them cognitively with the teaching of literacy and skills, in particular to the young. Here we have individuals who were often under-nourished in childhood, only to be
474
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
better fed than their free siblings back home, while under servitude. Did that later-in-life biological investment of calories enable them to live longer than their siblings or equivalents back home? Our community genealogists are already producing data and we will eventually be able to compare the convict experience and outcomes with those of slaves (Steckel, 2009). Thus the interdisciplinary nature of the research team, and the richness of the data, means that a wide spectrum of research questions will be investigated over the course of the project. We begin with the following schema.
8.1. Meta-questions What are the most significant factors in early-life exposures influencing survival, family formation, and the foundation of robust lineages? How significant are early-life exposures in creating resilience in later-life stress and infection exposures?
8.2. Behaviour, morbidity and mortality under stress Was there a relationship between ‘starter’ characteristics–native place, place of conviction, and socioeconomic status (convicts) and native place, place of enlistment, and socio-economic status (diggers)–and sickness on voyage, death under sentence, morbidity under sentence (convicts) and sickness in the AIF? Were starter characteristics predictive of the conduct and the psychological distress of convicts (insanity, alcohol abuse, violence, breach of rules and regulations) and diggers (war neurosis/shellshock, alcohol abuse, violence, desertion, venereal disease), or can such behaviour be better explained by wider environmental circumstances such as the operation of colonial labour markets or the intensity of combat experience? Was there an association between life expectancy and childhood nutrition as expressed through information about adult height? What impact did transportation have on life expectancy? Were the lives of convicts shorter than equivalent age cohorts in the British Isles? What was the impact of initial landing conditions of convicts and settlers on future socio-economic and health outcomes? Did those landed before the onset of the 1840s colonial depression, for example, fair better than subsequent cohorts? What impact did various punishment regimes (flogging, hard labour and solitary confinement) have on morbidity and mortality?
8.3. Immediate and generational family formation Is there evidence of dysfunctional behaviour that impacted upon the success of family formation, such as convictions, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, high infant mortality, and later child mortality? What was the impact of changing socio-economic conditions; opportunities and bottlenecks; acquisition of property and land; access to entitlements of education, welfare support, housing and health care on family formation and intergenerational household integrity? Is there a relationship between colonial family formation and life expectancy? Did male convicts who married live longer than their fellow transportees who lived to survive a sentence but failed to find a marriage partner? 8.4. Social and geographic mobility How many convicts never left the penal system and how many died in state care? Who stayed in the colonies and which colonies, who returned ‘home’, and who disappeared from records? How socially mobile were the convicts after sentence and did this differ between male and female convicts? What degree of intergenerational geographical/social mobility had occurred by the digger generation? Did the digger generation own land/urban property? If so, when did the family obtain land? Did the descendants of convicts become stuck in poverty traps? 8.5. Intergenerational anthropometrics What differences were there in convict heights according to year of birth, season of birth, native place, childhood food supply and infection exposure, place of conviction, parents alive, father dead, mother dead, both dead, siblings named, literacy, and occupation? What differences were there in AIF heights/body mass index according to year of birth, season of birth, birthplace, childhood food supply and infection exposure, place of enlistment, parents alive, father dead, mother dead, both dead, siblings named, literacy, education, occupation, and religion? What differences were there between heights of convicts and digger descendants controlling for native place of digger, socio-economic status of digger's family, number of siblings, parents alive/dead, education and skill of digger?
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
What relationship is there, if any, between stature and lifespan for convicts and diggers according to familial history of stature and socio-geographic characteristics as above? Was stature predictive of conduct under sentence or in AIF? Was stature predictive of immunity to infectious disease on the convict voyage, in the convict system, or in the AIF? 8.6. Influenza in the AIF Were morbidity, mortality and case-fatality rates from the 1918–19 influenza pandemic in the AIF higher than those of the non-combatant Australian population of the same age? Do morbidity and mortality patterns indicate preexisting immunity for sub-groups of the population, particularly for those born before 1891, those raised in urban areas, and those whose families experienced influenza mortality in the 1890–91 pandemic? Is there evidence of short-term deferred effects of infection, including depression, and cardiovascular, respiratory and all-cause morbidity and mortality? What does timing of epidemic waves, and incidence and timing of infection and re-infection, tell us about the prevalence of pre-existing immunity, and susceptibility to re-infection by time since initial infection? Did recent seasonal influenza infection provide protection against the 1918–19 epidemic? 9. Conclusion The ‘paper Panopticon’ was designed to see all, and record it in black and red ink. Of course, no system of surveillance is perfect, but the convict's record set reveals an extremely efficient technology of discipline. We can count how many times a convict was punished for insolence, for drunkenness, for absconding, for disobedience. We can count the number of lashes suffered, how many days in chains, on short rations, in solitary confinement. We can hear their voices in court records or statements; we can read their hopes and fears tattooed on their bodies and recorded and bound within large leather-backed volumes. We can follow the convicts in sickness and health, and even into the outer reaches of madness. We can reconstruct the families and the life experiences they left behind. With this information we can construct measures of temperament, physical and mental insults and early-life influences.
475
For the majority of convicts who survived the system, the decades following their release or, in some instances escape, have been largely unrecorded. The stories of the most infamous or the most successful have become part of the official record; but little systematic research has been done on those who quietly survived and stayed put, those who returned to their native place, those that continued roving around the world, or, indeed, those who became the founding mothers and fathers of modern Australian society. We have, for example, discovered through this project that many more convicts absconded and disappeared than had been previously suspected, particularly after the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851. Between 1846 and 1852, 16,000 former Tasmanian convicts were officially recorded as leaving the colony. Almost certainly many other departures went unrecorded–and some of these were still under sentence–a demographic deficit that left the penal system and the economy it supported, in some disarray (British Parliamentary Papers, 1854). Looking backwards, the convict indents include sufficient detail to reconstruct convict lives and families before transportation. In the case of Irish convicts, these are among the very few systematic records in the world providing household composition and size. Since the number transported, especially of Irish birth, expanded in the 1840s and concluded in 1853, it may be possible to reconstitute samples for the study of pre- , intra- and post-famine households. A long-term goal of this project (not currently funded) is to link Australian World War I service personnel to their children and grandchildren who were medically examined and measured for service in World War II and the Vietnam War. Using linked data from the convicts through to Vietnam, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury trends in life-course health can be explored with an unrivalled level of detail about family history, childhood and historically specific experience. In total, this presents the opportunity to explore life-course effects of various stressors, intergenerational effects and differential effects analysed according to body size, literacy and skills (human capital), family formation and temperament. Thus, we can envision a socio-demographic and epidemiological dataset that stretches over seven generations in more than 200 years. It is the scale of this endeavour, with its ability to link generations, building a composite picture of health and illness, in combination with family formation, which makes Founders and Survivors such an exciting project. But more than that, we believe that Founders and Survivors will produce a legacy that will outlast the project's funded-life. Our database will be a resource for
476
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
this and future generations researching in a vast array of areas. While we may predict some of these future uses, we are sure that many others will be both unpredictable and culturally significant. That is why it has been so important to refine our data handling strategies, for we are acutely aware that the success of our project will not be measured merely by the published work of team members', but by the legacy it leaves for future researchers. Acknowledgements This research is supported by the Australian Research Council. We would like to also acknowledge the kind assistance of the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. References Barlow, Genevieve (2009). Who do you think you are? Weekly times, 83. Barrowclough, A. (2008, August 1). Kevin Rudd descended from thieves and forgers. Times online http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/news/world/article4440698.ece, accessed April 2010. Boonstra, Onno, Breure, Leen, & Doorn, Peter (2004). Past, present and future of historical information science. Historical social research, 29(2), 4−132. Bouchard, G. (2010). Projet Balsac. www.uqac.ca/balsac/ang/index. php accessed January 2010. Bradley, John (2005). Documents and data: Modelling materials for humanities research in XML and relational databases. Literary and linguistic computing, 20(1), 133−151. Bradley, John, & Short, Harold (2005). Texts into databases: The evolving field of new-style prosopography. Literary and linguistic computing, 20, 3−24 (Suppl.). British Parliamentary Papers (1854). Return of the number and description of persons who have arrived and departed from Van Diemen's Land. Crime & Transportation series, 11 (1851–4) & 12 (1852–3). Bygren, L., Edvinsson, S., & Brostrom, G. (2000). Change in food availability during pregnancy: Is it related to adult sudden death from cerebro- and cardiovascular disease in offspring? American journal of human biology, 12, 447−453. Bygren, L., Gunnar, G., & Edvinsson, S. (2001). Longevity determined by ancestors' overnutrition during their slow growth period. Acta biotheoretica, 49(1), 53−59. Costa, D. L. (1993). Height, weight, wartime stress, and older age mortality: Evidence from the Union Army records. Explorations in economic history, 30, 424−449. Costa, D. L., & Kahn, M. E. (2008). Heroes and cowards: The social face of war. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dwyer, T. (2001). The Menzies centre for population research. Medical journal of Australia, 175, 617−620. Edvinsson, S. (2000). The demographic data base at Umeå University: A resource for historical studies. In P. Hall, R. McCaa, & G. Thorvaldsen (Eds.), Handbook of international historical microdata for population research (pp. 231−249). international.ipums.
org/international/microdata_handbook.shtml: Minnesota Population Center, accessed January 2010. Farouque, F. (2009, January 26). Proud convict past an evolutionary lesson for snooty Darwin. The age, 3. Fogel, R. (2004). The escape from hunger and premature death, 1700– 2100: Europe, America, and the third world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galobardes, B., Lynch, John W., & Davey Smith, George (2004). Childhood socioeconomic circumstances and cause-specific mortality in adulthood: Systematic review and interpretation. Epidemiologic reviews, 26, 7−21. Hacker, J. D. (2009). Peer effects in the American civil war. Historical methods, 42, 135−138. Harbor, C. (2008). New wine from old bottles: Reexamining an established database. Historical methods, 41(1), 3−16. Higgs, Edward (2010). New for the universities: The University of Essex. Local population studies, 84, 93−96. Holman, C. D. J., Bass, A. J., Rouse, I. L., & Hobbs, M. S. T. (1999). Population-based linkage of health records in Western Australia: Development of a health services research linked database. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 23(5), 453−459. Hull, T. (2007). The strange history and problematic future of the Australian census. Journal of population research, 24(1), 1−22. Liu, A. (2004). Transcendental data: Toward a cultural history and aesthetics of the new encoded discourse. Critical inquiry, 31(1), 49−84. Kuh, D., & Davey Smith, George (1993). When is mortality risk determined? Historical insights into a current debate. Social history of medicine, 6(1), 101−123. Lynch, J., & Davey Smith, G. (2005). A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology. Annual review of public health, 26, 1−35. Mandemakers, Kees (2000). Historical sample of the Netherlands. In P. Hall, R. McCaa, & G. Thorvaldsen (Eds.), Handbook of international historical microdata for population research (pp. 149−198). international.ipums.org/international/microdata_ handbook.shtml: Minnesota Population Center, accessed June 2010. Mandemakers, Kees (2008). LINKS: LINKing system for historical family reconstruction. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History. www.iisg.nl/hsn/documents/links-project.pdf, accessed January 2010. Mandemakers, Kees, & Dillon, Lisa (2001). Best practices with large databases on historical populations. History and computing, 13(2), 207−216. Martin, R. M., Gunnell, D., Pemberton, John, Frankell, Stephen, & Davey Smith, George (2005). Cohort profile: The Boyd-Orr cohort—an historical cohort study based on the 65-year follow-up of the Carnegie survey of diet and health (1937–39). International journal of epidemiology, 34, 742−749. Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish, & McCalman, Janet (2010). Life matters: A convict in the family (interview by Richard Aedy). www.abc. net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2010/2804307.htm ABC Radio National, accessed January 2010. McCalman, Janet (2009a). Personal details: The Founders and Survivors project. Ancestor: Quarterly journal of the genealogical society of victoria, 29(6), 7−9. McCalman, Janet (2009b). Chains of evidence: The Founders and Survivors project. The genealogist: Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies, 12(10), 16−17. McCalman, Janet (2009c). Is there a Tasmanian convict in your family tree? Participants sought for study into Australia's founding
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477 population. Ancestral searcher: Journal of the heraldry and genealogy society of Canberra, 32(2), 71−72. Mineau, Gerri (2009). Pedigree and population resource: Utah population database. www.huntsmancancer.org/groups/ppr/ University of Utah, accessed January 2010. Riley, J. C. (1989). Sickness, recovery and death: A history and forecast of ill health. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Schürer, Kevin (2007). Creating a nationally representative individual and household sample for Great Britain, 1851 to 1901—the Victorian panel study (VPS). Historical social research, 32(2), 211−331. Spaeth, Donald A. (2004). Representing text as data: The analysis of historical sources in XML. Historical methods, 37(2), 73−85.
477
Spurger-McQueen, C. M., & Burnard, Lou (2003). A gentle introduction to XML. http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/SG.html Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, accessed 30 April 2010. Steckel, R. H. (2009). A peculiar population: The nutrition, health, and mortality of American slaves from childhood to maturity. The journal of economic history, 46(3), 721−741. UNESCO. (2009). Memory of the world register. portal.unesco.org/ ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=1538&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html accessed January 2010. Wrigley, E. A., Davies, R. S., Oeppen, J. E., & Schofield, R. S. (1997). English population history from family reconstitution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Research note: The founders and survivors project James Bradley a,⁎, Rebecca Kippen a , Hamish Maxwell-Stewart b , Janet McCalman a , Sandra Silcot a a
Centre for Health and Society, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne, Level 4, 207 Bouverie St, Victoria 3010, Australia b School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 81, Hobart Tasmania 7001, Australia
Abstract This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival, family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility. Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Australia; Convicts; Longitudinal; Life course; Historical; Cohort
1. Introduction Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context is a major long-term project which is building a longitudinal study of a key founder population of modern Australia: Tasmanian convicts and their descendants. The project is reconstituting Australian life courses, families and generations in the historical context, using a wealth of data from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Research topics include fertility and household formation, life-course and intergenerational health and mortality, social and geographic mobility, and behaviour under stress. The research team includes historians, demographers, epidemiologists and information technologists from the universities of Tasmania, Melbourne, Flinders, New ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +61 3 8344 0716. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Bradley).
South Wales, Oxford and the Australian National University, and the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. Funding comes from the Australian Research Council. 2. Background Between 1803 and 1853, at least 72,500 convicts were transported to the British colony of Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856). From the point of their arrest, in the British Isles and other parts of the empire, to the date of their release in Australia, these individuals were the subjects of intense documentation: a ‘Paper Panopticon’.1 We know the colour of their eyes, how tall they were, where they were born, where 1 The original panopticon was a prison designed by the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. In principal it allowed for the constant surveillance of prisoners.
1081-602X/$ - see front matter. Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2010.08.002
468
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
they were sent to work, how many days they spent labouring on the roads or in penal stations, who was sick on the voyage to Australia and who died under sentence (see Fig. 1 for one of the many elements of the ‘Paper Panopticon’). The records are the most detailed nineteenth century source anywhere in the world for family history, bodies and the behaviour of ordinary men and women. In 2007 the Australian convict records were inscribed onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in recognition of their ‘world significance and outstanding universal value’ (UNESCO, 2009). These records, from New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia, capture two populations: a broad spectrum of British and Irish men, women and juveniles who fell foul of the law; and a smaller sub-set who
survived penal servitude to establish lineages that became a significant part of the foundational population of these settler colonies. What these sources reveal, and what makes them especially significant, is the varying impact of the system on men and women. Our initial forays into the sources have revealed, for example, that while approximately 90 percent of convict women married (or remarried) in the Australian colonies, the figure for men was significantly lower. Only one in four of the 259 men transported on the convict transport Duncan (1841), for example, could be traced to a colonial marriage. Nevertheless the overall numbers of transported convicts (until the 1850s they made up the bulk of the colonial settler population), and the relative shortage of women who arrived as free settlers, ensured
Fig. 1. A page from a conduct register (Archives Office of Tasmania CON 33), giving a vast amount of detail about Thomas Newton's life, vital statistics and crimes. This document was an integral part of the Paper Panopticon. Note Newton's unfortunate demise dying from over-indulging in strong spirits.
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
greater potential for longitudinal life-course research across the social and medical sciences than datasets built from parish records. The high quality of Australian civil registration (births, deaths and marriages) means that we can trace convicts' descendants through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Using Australian service records from the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF), we can compare the experiences and traits of convicts to those of their direct descendants who enlisted during World War I (see below, Section 8). The database is an exercise in prosopographical demography; that is, individual life histories are synthesised from a variety of sources for an entire population to enable the study of that population. Diverse historical sources will provide ‘sightings’ of individuals at many different stages of the life course. Where possible, these sightings will be located in historical time and place using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Among other things, these will yield some measure of likely exposures to variations in food supply, to dislocations from urbanisation, and family fortunes. Their very richness, the vast amount of individual micro-level data they contain, and the scope for linking them to other data sets outside of the penal system, provides us with the ability to reconstruct the lives and families of thousands of individuals born in Britain and elsewhere during the critical period of social and economic transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century (for an overview of the scope of the sources, see Fig. 2).
that the convicts had a significant impact on the demography of colonial Australia. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the stigma associated with convict descent encouraged many Australians to obfuscate details of their family past. This has made it difficult to quantify the long-term demographic impact of convict transportation, although these effects have been partially reversed by the huge upsurge in the popularity of family history following the bicentenary of European settlement in 1988. For most Australians convict descent is now considered something of which to be proud. Two immediately past Prime Ministers are amongst the large numbers who have discovered that they have convict ancestry, and at least Kevin Rudd delights in his six convict ancestors as an ‘absolute pedigree’ (Barrowclough, 2008). Thus the convict records tell two important stories beyond that of the convict experience itself: firstly of the societies and regimes that exiled them; secondly of the society that a minority contributed to demographically. Founders and Survivors began in 2007 and is now in its fourth year of building a longitudinal database that will enable demographic and historical analysis of the Tasmanian convicts, their origins, their experiences and their descendants. Having captured the record set in digital images, over 1 million lines of data have been entered that provide critical indicators of the vital statistics and life courses of the Tasmanian convicts (see below, Section 4). The richness of the biological and behavioural data in the convict records offers even
Surgeons’ journals
Physical descriptions
Indents
Local offences
Musters
Abscondings/ recaptures
Burials
Birth, death and marriage registrations
469
Confessions
Tickets of leave, pardons, certificates of freedom, police promotions/demotions, labour category shifts
Invalid depot and pauper institution admissions
Free arrivals
Deaths under sentence
Departures
Fig. 2. Schema of sources for Founders and Survivors, and the relationship between those sources.
470
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
3. Historical cohort studies Longitudinal population and cohort studies are now central to the understanding of population health, social and economic analysis and policy formation. Until recently, historical, multi-generational datasets were fewer and more difficult to construct due to lack of past records. However, the International Commission for Historical Demography reveals that there are now at least twenty projects, from Europe and Scandinavia, to North America and Australasia, all attempting to create this type of database. Some of the great historical and contemporary datasets of the world are from Sweden, in particular the Umeå Population Database constructed from Swedish annual parish registers kept from the 1700s (Edvinsson, 2000). The Umeå Database provides long-run demographic and socio-economic data, which enables investigations into multi-generational effects of external stressors such as climate change, periodic famine, economic stress and infectious diseases. The unique identifier given each Swedish citizen allows linkage between historical records and more contemporary records, providing (under strict protocols of privacy) data that are used by researchers from around the world. Other studies include Projet Balsac (Bouchard, 2010), a reconstitution of the Quebecois population based on the French settlers' parish registers. The Historical Sample of the Netherlands was established to create a representative dataset of individual level data collected from ‘birth certificates, death certificates, personal cards, marriage certificates and population registers’. The sample of 78,000 individuals from the birth period 1812–1922 not only offers a resource to scholars for their own research, but also provides a control group against which other studies can be measured and compared (Mandemakers, 2000). More recently Mandemakers and his team have instituted the LINKs project which aims to provide a tool allowing the enrichment and linkage of data from the GENLIAS project, which is digitising 32 million Dutch birth, death and marriage certificates from 1811 to the early twentieth century (Mandemakers, 2008). In the United Kingdom, the Cambridge Population Group used parish registers and volunteer genealogists to reconstitute a sample of the English population in the eighteenth century, before civil registration began in 1837 (Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, & Schofield, 1997). George Davey Smith and Steven Frankel have resuscitated the Boyd-Orr cohort first studied in Scotland in the late 1930s (Martin, Gunnell, Pemberton, Frankell, & Davey Smith, 2005). More recently Schürer and Higgs, at the
University of Essex, have been funded to produce the Integrated Census Microdata project, which aims to standardise UK census micro-data producing a longitudinal database of individuals and households between 1851–1911 (Higgs, 2010). This will be the first stage of the Victorian Panel Study as envisaged by Schürer (Schürer, 2007). In the United States, datasets include the Union Army Sample–used by Robert Fogel, for the investigation of ageing (Fogel, 2004), and by Dora Costa and many others for a wide range of studies (Costa, 1993; Costa & Kahn, 2008; Hacker, 2009)–and the Utah Population Database, which covers up to eleven generations and is used to research genetic disease propensity, links between fertility and longevity and early-life impacts on later-life mortality (Mineau, 2009). The United States is also home to the biggest longitudinal micro-data project, the University of Minnesota's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, which has standardised census data from 55 countries, covering 158 censuses, in the process creating 325 million records relating to individuals and households. Founders and Survivors is thus part of a wider group of studies that seek to track the life courses of ordinary people and their descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The research team collaborates with and draws on the expertise of colleagues associated with these other projects, especially the Umeå Population Database. 4. Data In the first year of Founders and Survivors, 354 volumes of convict records–a total of over 68,000 images–were digitally captured for research purposes. Copies of these are now available through the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office website and can be accessed on line (http://www.archives.tas.gov. au/generic/convict-records-online). To date, the following data have been collected: 1. 9,000 deaths for convicts under sentence; 7,000 burials for the colonial population as a whole (for the period 1803–38); 195,000 births, 93,000 deaths and 51,000 marriages registered in Tasmania for the period (1838–99). 2. 12,000 records for convicts, crew, soldiers and their families treated by ships' surgeons during the voyage to Australia (1818–53). 3. 37,900 physical descriptions of the convicts (c. 50% of the men, and c.100% of the women), including height, and distinguishing features; 37,000 indents
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
(out of c. 70,000) listing, amongst other things, places of trial, sentence, occupations and literacy; 38,700 confessions (including a few protestations of innocence), including details of prior offences and behaviour under sentence prior to disembarkation in Tasmania (all covering 1816–53). 25,900 offences for which convicts were tried before magistrates benches in Tasmania between 1816–80 (recording all the offences of a 1:25 systematic sample of the male convicts), including the punishments awarded. All surviving 49,000 muster records providing the location to which each convict was assigned (1830– 35). All 68,700 of the absconding and recapture notices published in the government Gazette, a weekly publication that printed and distributed official notices and information; all 220,000 Gazette notifications of tickets of leave, pardons, certificates of freedom and promotions and demotions from the police; and all 23,700 Gazette probation class notifications recording the movement of prisoners between different labour categories. 42,000 free arrivals to Tasmania and 114,500 departures for free people, including convicts free by servitude, in the period to 1860. 20,000 admissions to invalid depots and pauper institutions, 1880–1920.
This totals 1,044,400 records collected, cleaned, and transcribed. Because transcriptions are linked in many cases to images of the original source, the data are textual, visual and numerical. The next task will be linkage of these records, internally, and to other collections including the civil registration records of other colonies, United Kingdom census data, and the Old Bailey records. This linkage will allow us to reconstitute life courses, families and generations. Future steps include transcribing and linking to the service records of descendants who served in the First Australian Imperial Force (World War I) and their veteran medical records (under strict medical-ethics protocols). 5. Text encoding initiative and data handling A core technology for Founders and Survivors is the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI schema for encoding information about individuals and social contexts is being used to encode and aggregate all of the diverse historical sources about Tasmanian convicts and their descendants. The TEI is a collaborative project
471
that has evolved over twenty years into an international and interdisciplinary standard, based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). TEI is widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching. The TEI consortium is an international non-profit organisation of TEI users whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and historical texts (see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml). In recent years the TEI standard has evolved to enable the encoding of persons, places, events, dates, complex personal and social relationships, and data about populations. The decision to use the TEI has the following important implications for this project: • all data is stored in an open, non-proprietary, nonbinary, accessible (computer and human-readable) standard format using XML, which can be easily presented by web-browsers; • all the TEI files incorporate metadata and semantic description of the encoded data, meaning that documentation and metadata are always available with the core data; • reuse in other contexts is enhanced because TEI person, organisation, place, event, state and trait element encodings are powerful enough to act as a generic ‘normalised’ format (that is, common and reusable); • TEI enables data to be mapped to facsimiles (images) in flexible ways, even enabling zones within images to be associated with data transcribed from them; • the project benefits from the wealth of freely accessible tools for the processing of XML and TEI data (e.g. visualisation tools such as BaseX http:// www.basex.org/, TEI transformation scripts and stylesheets); • data content and presentation are separated, again facilitating reuse (Liu, 2004; Spurger-McQueen & Burnard, 2003). This last point is critical. By separating the data from its presentation we are able to overcome one of the fundamental problems faced by projects constructing historical databases: the conflict between retaining the structural integrity of the original source, with the need to restructure the original source in such a way that information may be transformed into data and data into well-founded conclusions. Thus, in historical computing it has long been a trope that a database should replicate the original source as closely as possible, recording misspellings, data out of place, and all the other messes
472
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
that we associate with historical sources: or as Mandemakers and Dillon put it, ‘the data-entry process should preclude the necessity of further inspection of the original primary source’, in other words ‘literal transcription’ (Mandemakers & Dillon, 2001). It is maintained that this proximity to the source allows for more effective error checking, but more importantly makes the data re-usable (Harbor, 2008). However, because it is hard to replicate the complexities of an archival document the temptation has always been to enclose the data within a structure that allows for easy analysis; often the more structured a database was the further from the original source it had travelled. The XML-based TEI gives these types of projects a new model, where the document can be closely replicated using mark-up that identifies not only the data entities, but also the attributes of those entities. Furthermore, because mark-up provides bounded-fields, it is possible to copy, rather than extract, those fields into a Relational Database Management System, allowing for traditional data analysis. Thus by maintaining the source's integrity, while opening up the source to structured analysis, we effectively address many of the important parts of the ‘life-cycle of historical information’ (Boonstra, Breure, & Doorn, 2004). This model has been advocated and trialled by a number of scholars (Spaeth, 2004; Bradley, 2005; Bradley & Short, 2005), and the award-winning website, Old Bailey Online, implemented such a system. Indeed, the Old Bailey's publicly available statistical functions are based upon an XML-to-RDBMS system. The technical developers of Founders and Survivors have designed and piloted a more advanced system, and demonstrated its feasibility for handling vast amounts of data.
6. Linkage Linkage of data about the same person, and intergenerational linkage (family trees), is managed by highly specialised link-management software (Holman, Bass, Rouse, & Hobbs, 1999). Through use of this software, the project's researchers can access aggregated data about individuals and populations without losing track of the diversity of sources from which the data are derived. Keeping link-management separate from the data enables straightforward corrections and additions to links to be made. By enabling full transparency and retaining a history of the matching/linking process, team members can clearly trace and detect any potential biases or censorings introduced as the nominal matching and genealogical linkage progresses. This level of
absolute transparency is required to support defensible generalised interpretations of population data. Various strategies are being employed to automate nominal data linkages. This process involves the consistent handling of the naming of identities across sources by using standardised TEI formats for prosopographical representations of names, dates and places. TEI easily allows for flexible but common representations of multiple names and name parts, and allows recording at source for soundex codes (or other name standardisation software routines), known aliases and other normalised spelling/stemming of names. Matching software will be specifically designed to process these TEI standardised names and name parts. Linkage of convict data within the system is straightforward. The paper Panopticon used a rigorously applied identification system, which allowed the linkage of convicts between the different records: each convict was given a unique identifying police number that was used as the primary index. Outside of the paper Panopticon, convict names (first, middle and family), ship name and date of arrival were the most commonly used identifiers, and form the principal basis for linking convicts to their descendants in the colonial birth, death and marriage records. Using these, with the addition of other variables (like occupation) to ensure a high confidence in the links, the process has now commenced. Australian governments may have been poor custodians of census returns–almost none remain from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hull, 2007)–but the colonial governments, especially in Tasmania and Victoria, were advanced for their time in the administration of civil registration of births, deaths and marriages. Tasmanian civil registration began in 1838, just a year after it did in England and Wales, and the system instituted in Victoria in 1853 remains among the most detailed registration system in the world. These will allow us to reconstruct rich family histories. Previous historical cohort studies have incorporated the voluntary research of family historians. This project likewise offers opportunities for a meaningful collaboration between university researchers and the community. Family historians can provide access to family birth, death and marriage records, and will enable us to identify retrospectively many convicts who changed their names. Such collaboration will also provide an opportunity to test the results of automated record linkage against a large sample of manually linked records, a process that will enable the project to estimate the proportion of false positives achieved under various automated linkage procedures.
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
7. Community involvement, ethics and privacy To maintain and encourage public participation, the project has a high level of community engagement. This is achieved through newspaper articles (Barlow, 2009; Farouque, 2009), national radio coverage (MaxwellStewart & McCalman, 2010), presentations to Australian family history groups, articles in family history publications (McCalman, 2009a,b,c), the project website (www.foundersandsurvivors.org), and a quarterly project newsletter Chainletter (www.foundersandsurvivors.org/ newsletter). Thus far, recognising the unique skills base and experiences of family historians, the project has recruited more than 400 volunteers to aid the work of tracing convicts and their descendants. Nevertheless, the involvement of family historians, particularly as the donors of detailed family trees, has required the development of privacy protocols. The work of Founders and Survivors is by necessity conducted according to the ethics protocols of the participating universities, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. The genealogies and other family information donated to the project can only be used for the database and not passed on to any third party, even another family member or government authority. The data is stored in secure and confidential data storage along with the many databases held by the University of Melbourne and the Menzies Research Institute at the University of Tasmania. The data is stored in two databases: one with names and contact details that can be accessed only by certified researchers under strict access conditions for the purposes of linking names and entering the core data. The second has every individual converted to a number, and this is the database that will be used by researchers for population, medical and social analysis. Equally, as the Australian Research Council requires publicly funded databases to become nation resources open to researchers outside the project team, it is only the second, de-identified data, that will be made available in the public domain (for more information see http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/plans). 8. Research questions There are two critical research questions that can and will be investigated. The first relates to life-course analysis, and focuses upon human resilience and the impact of insults suffered at critical periods of the lifecourse upon survival and human social performance. This question is developed from the work on sickness by Riley, Davey Smith, Kuh and others (Riley, 1989; Kuh
473
& Davey Smith, 1993; Galobardes, Lynch, & Davey Smith, 2004; Lynch & Davey Smith, 2005). The second converges upon the intergenerational effects and influences of the convict experience. While historical life-course analysis is perforce limited to human measurement in height, life span, fertility, socioeconomic status, causes of death, it has the potential to complement life-course analysis that has access to genetic data. All these human measurements can be plotted against historical exposures: epidemics, famine, war trauma and socio-economic change. Nutritional status in childhood can be inferred from adult height calibrated against historical geographic data when the time and location of birth and childhood are known and there is an adequate denominator population for a cohort (Bygren, Edvinsson, & Brostrom, 2000;Bygren, Gunnar, & Edvinsson, 2001). In the case of the convicts and their AIF-descendants (colloquially referred to as “diggers”), sufficient data may be obtained by linking convict indents to census data, and military attestation papers with civil registration, to assess family ‘integrity’ in childhood and adolescence, particularly absence of parents, homelessness, destitution, siblings, and socioeconomic status. The study of intergenerational effects is possible because we can construct cradle-to-grave studies of a sample of soldiers who served in World War I from their military and pension/health records. They can then be linked back to direct male and female convict ancestors. Our partner in this research is the Menzies Centre for Population Research at the University of Tasmania, which already has an intergenerational genetic database built from 10,000 founding families of the 1840s (Dwyer, 2001). Founders and Survivors will be able to provide the Menzies' genetic database with an identified sub-population that can be traced backwards to their descriptions in the convict archive and forwards to the diggers' records. We are collecting data on eyecolour, for instance, for the Menzies researchers. There are distinctive characteristics about this convict population and their experience. First, the vast majority of convicts were poor; second, their experience and stressors were minutely recorded; third, their care was under medical superintendence that left a record; fourth, unlike slaves, their servitude could result in freedom and rehabilitation; fifth, their behaviour in response to stress was recorded; and finally, if they did not suffer the privations of secondary punishment (which a majority did not), the penal system invested in them biologically with high-calorie working diets, and in them cognitively with the teaching of literacy and skills, in particular to the young. Here we have individuals who were often under-nourished in childhood, only to be
474
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
better fed than their free siblings back home, while under servitude. Did that later-in-life biological investment of calories enable them to live longer than their siblings or equivalents back home? Our community genealogists are already producing data and we will eventually be able to compare the convict experience and outcomes with those of slaves (Steckel, 2009). Thus the interdisciplinary nature of the research team, and the richness of the data, means that a wide spectrum of research questions will be investigated over the course of the project. We begin with the following schema.
8.1. Meta-questions What are the most significant factors in early-life exposures influencing survival, family formation, and the foundation of robust lineages? How significant are early-life exposures in creating resilience in later-life stress and infection exposures?
8.2. Behaviour, morbidity and mortality under stress Was there a relationship between ‘starter’ characteristics–native place, place of conviction, and socioeconomic status (convicts) and native place, place of enlistment, and socio-economic status (diggers)–and sickness on voyage, death under sentence, morbidity under sentence (convicts) and sickness in the AIF? Were starter characteristics predictive of the conduct and the psychological distress of convicts (insanity, alcohol abuse, violence, breach of rules and regulations) and diggers (war neurosis/shellshock, alcohol abuse, violence, desertion, venereal disease), or can such behaviour be better explained by wider environmental circumstances such as the operation of colonial labour markets or the intensity of combat experience? Was there an association between life expectancy and childhood nutrition as expressed through information about adult height? What impact did transportation have on life expectancy? Were the lives of convicts shorter than equivalent age cohorts in the British Isles? What was the impact of initial landing conditions of convicts and settlers on future socio-economic and health outcomes? Did those landed before the onset of the 1840s colonial depression, for example, fair better than subsequent cohorts? What impact did various punishment regimes (flogging, hard labour and solitary confinement) have on morbidity and mortality?
8.3. Immediate and generational family formation Is there evidence of dysfunctional behaviour that impacted upon the success of family formation, such as convictions, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, high infant mortality, and later child mortality? What was the impact of changing socio-economic conditions; opportunities and bottlenecks; acquisition of property and land; access to entitlements of education, welfare support, housing and health care on family formation and intergenerational household integrity? Is there a relationship between colonial family formation and life expectancy? Did male convicts who married live longer than their fellow transportees who lived to survive a sentence but failed to find a marriage partner? 8.4. Social and geographic mobility How many convicts never left the penal system and how many died in state care? Who stayed in the colonies and which colonies, who returned ‘home’, and who disappeared from records? How socially mobile were the convicts after sentence and did this differ between male and female convicts? What degree of intergenerational geographical/social mobility had occurred by the digger generation? Did the digger generation own land/urban property? If so, when did the family obtain land? Did the descendants of convicts become stuck in poverty traps? 8.5. Intergenerational anthropometrics What differences were there in convict heights according to year of birth, season of birth, native place, childhood food supply and infection exposure, place of conviction, parents alive, father dead, mother dead, both dead, siblings named, literacy, and occupation? What differences were there in AIF heights/body mass index according to year of birth, season of birth, birthplace, childhood food supply and infection exposure, place of enlistment, parents alive, father dead, mother dead, both dead, siblings named, literacy, education, occupation, and religion? What differences were there between heights of convicts and digger descendants controlling for native place of digger, socio-economic status of digger's family, number of siblings, parents alive/dead, education and skill of digger?
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
What relationship is there, if any, between stature and lifespan for convicts and diggers according to familial history of stature and socio-geographic characteristics as above? Was stature predictive of conduct under sentence or in AIF? Was stature predictive of immunity to infectious disease on the convict voyage, in the convict system, or in the AIF? 8.6. Influenza in the AIF Were morbidity, mortality and case-fatality rates from the 1918–19 influenza pandemic in the AIF higher than those of the non-combatant Australian population of the same age? Do morbidity and mortality patterns indicate preexisting immunity for sub-groups of the population, particularly for those born before 1891, those raised in urban areas, and those whose families experienced influenza mortality in the 1890–91 pandemic? Is there evidence of short-term deferred effects of infection, including depression, and cardiovascular, respiratory and all-cause morbidity and mortality? What does timing of epidemic waves, and incidence and timing of infection and re-infection, tell us about the prevalence of pre-existing immunity, and susceptibility to re-infection by time since initial infection? Did recent seasonal influenza infection provide protection against the 1918–19 epidemic? 9. Conclusion The ‘paper Panopticon’ was designed to see all, and record it in black and red ink. Of course, no system of surveillance is perfect, but the convict's record set reveals an extremely efficient technology of discipline. We can count how many times a convict was punished for insolence, for drunkenness, for absconding, for disobedience. We can count the number of lashes suffered, how many days in chains, on short rations, in solitary confinement. We can hear their voices in court records or statements; we can read their hopes and fears tattooed on their bodies and recorded and bound within large leather-backed volumes. We can follow the convicts in sickness and health, and even into the outer reaches of madness. We can reconstruct the families and the life experiences they left behind. With this information we can construct measures of temperament, physical and mental insults and early-life influences.
475
For the majority of convicts who survived the system, the decades following their release or, in some instances escape, have been largely unrecorded. The stories of the most infamous or the most successful have become part of the official record; but little systematic research has been done on those who quietly survived and stayed put, those who returned to their native place, those that continued roving around the world, or, indeed, those who became the founding mothers and fathers of modern Australian society. We have, for example, discovered through this project that many more convicts absconded and disappeared than had been previously suspected, particularly after the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851. Between 1846 and 1852, 16,000 former Tasmanian convicts were officially recorded as leaving the colony. Almost certainly many other departures went unrecorded–and some of these were still under sentence–a demographic deficit that left the penal system and the economy it supported, in some disarray (British Parliamentary Papers, 1854). Looking backwards, the convict indents include sufficient detail to reconstruct convict lives and families before transportation. In the case of Irish convicts, these are among the very few systematic records in the world providing household composition and size. Since the number transported, especially of Irish birth, expanded in the 1840s and concluded in 1853, it may be possible to reconstitute samples for the study of pre- , intra- and post-famine households. A long-term goal of this project (not currently funded) is to link Australian World War I service personnel to their children and grandchildren who were medically examined and measured for service in World War II and the Vietnam War. Using linked data from the convicts through to Vietnam, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury trends in life-course health can be explored with an unrivalled level of detail about family history, childhood and historically specific experience. In total, this presents the opportunity to explore life-course effects of various stressors, intergenerational effects and differential effects analysed according to body size, literacy and skills (human capital), family formation and temperament. Thus, we can envision a socio-demographic and epidemiological dataset that stretches over seven generations in more than 200 years. It is the scale of this endeavour, with its ability to link generations, building a composite picture of health and illness, in combination with family formation, which makes Founders and Survivors such an exciting project. But more than that, we believe that Founders and Survivors will produce a legacy that will outlast the project's funded-life. Our database will be a resource for
476
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477
this and future generations researching in a vast array of areas. While we may predict some of these future uses, we are sure that many others will be both unpredictable and culturally significant. That is why it has been so important to refine our data handling strategies, for we are acutely aware that the success of our project will not be measured merely by the published work of team members', but by the legacy it leaves for future researchers. Acknowledgements This research is supported by the Australian Research Council. We would like to also acknowledge the kind assistance of the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. References Barlow, Genevieve (2009). Who do you think you are? Weekly times, 83. Barrowclough, A. (2008, August 1). Kevin Rudd descended from thieves and forgers. Times online http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/news/world/article4440698.ece, accessed April 2010. Boonstra, Onno, Breure, Leen, & Doorn, Peter (2004). Past, present and future of historical information science. Historical social research, 29(2), 4−132. Bouchard, G. (2010). Projet Balsac. www.uqac.ca/balsac/ang/index. php accessed January 2010. Bradley, John (2005). Documents and data: Modelling materials for humanities research in XML and relational databases. Literary and linguistic computing, 20(1), 133−151. Bradley, John, & Short, Harold (2005). Texts into databases: The evolving field of new-style prosopography. Literary and linguistic computing, 20, 3−24 (Suppl.). British Parliamentary Papers (1854). Return of the number and description of persons who have arrived and departed from Van Diemen's Land. Crime & Transportation series, 11 (1851–4) & 12 (1852–3). Bygren, L., Edvinsson, S., & Brostrom, G. (2000). Change in food availability during pregnancy: Is it related to adult sudden death from cerebro- and cardiovascular disease in offspring? American journal of human biology, 12, 447−453. Bygren, L., Gunnar, G., & Edvinsson, S. (2001). Longevity determined by ancestors' overnutrition during their slow growth period. Acta biotheoretica, 49(1), 53−59. Costa, D. L. (1993). Height, weight, wartime stress, and older age mortality: Evidence from the Union Army records. Explorations in economic history, 30, 424−449. Costa, D. L., & Kahn, M. E. (2008). Heroes and cowards: The social face of war. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dwyer, T. (2001). The Menzies centre for population research. Medical journal of Australia, 175, 617−620. Edvinsson, S. (2000). The demographic data base at Umeå University: A resource for historical studies. In P. Hall, R. McCaa, & G. Thorvaldsen (Eds.), Handbook of international historical microdata for population research (pp. 231−249). international.ipums.
org/international/microdata_handbook.shtml: Minnesota Population Center, accessed January 2010. Farouque, F. (2009, January 26). Proud convict past an evolutionary lesson for snooty Darwin. The age, 3. Fogel, R. (2004). The escape from hunger and premature death, 1700– 2100: Europe, America, and the third world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galobardes, B., Lynch, John W., & Davey Smith, George (2004). Childhood socioeconomic circumstances and cause-specific mortality in adulthood: Systematic review and interpretation. Epidemiologic reviews, 26, 7−21. Hacker, J. D. (2009). Peer effects in the American civil war. Historical methods, 42, 135−138. Harbor, C. (2008). New wine from old bottles: Reexamining an established database. Historical methods, 41(1), 3−16. Higgs, Edward (2010). New for the universities: The University of Essex. Local population studies, 84, 93−96. Holman, C. D. J., Bass, A. J., Rouse, I. L., & Hobbs, M. S. T. (1999). Population-based linkage of health records in Western Australia: Development of a health services research linked database. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 23(5), 453−459. Hull, T. (2007). The strange history and problematic future of the Australian census. Journal of population research, 24(1), 1−22. Liu, A. (2004). Transcendental data: Toward a cultural history and aesthetics of the new encoded discourse. Critical inquiry, 31(1), 49−84. Kuh, D., & Davey Smith, George (1993). When is mortality risk determined? Historical insights into a current debate. Social history of medicine, 6(1), 101−123. Lynch, J., & Davey Smith, G. (2005). A life course approach to chronic disease epidemiology. Annual review of public health, 26, 1−35. Mandemakers, Kees (2000). Historical sample of the Netherlands. In P. Hall, R. McCaa, & G. Thorvaldsen (Eds.), Handbook of international historical microdata for population research (pp. 149−198). international.ipums.org/international/microdata_ handbook.shtml: Minnesota Population Center, accessed June 2010. Mandemakers, Kees (2008). LINKS: LINKing system for historical family reconstruction. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History. www.iisg.nl/hsn/documents/links-project.pdf, accessed January 2010. Mandemakers, Kees, & Dillon, Lisa (2001). Best practices with large databases on historical populations. History and computing, 13(2), 207−216. Martin, R. M., Gunnell, D., Pemberton, John, Frankell, Stephen, & Davey Smith, George (2005). Cohort profile: The Boyd-Orr cohort—an historical cohort study based on the 65-year follow-up of the Carnegie survey of diet and health (1937–39). International journal of epidemiology, 34, 742−749. Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish, & McCalman, Janet (2010). Life matters: A convict in the family (interview by Richard Aedy). www.abc. net.au/rn/lifematters/stories/2010/2804307.htm ABC Radio National, accessed January 2010. McCalman, Janet (2009a). Personal details: The Founders and Survivors project. Ancestor: Quarterly journal of the genealogical society of victoria, 29(6), 7−9. McCalman, Janet (2009b). Chains of evidence: The Founders and Survivors project. The genealogist: Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies, 12(10), 16−17. McCalman, Janet (2009c). Is there a Tasmanian convict in your family tree? Participants sought for study into Australia's founding
J. Bradley et al. / History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477 population. Ancestral searcher: Journal of the heraldry and genealogy society of Canberra, 32(2), 71−72. Mineau, Gerri (2009). Pedigree and population resource: Utah population database. www.huntsmancancer.org/groups/ppr/ University of Utah, accessed January 2010. Riley, J. C. (1989). Sickness, recovery and death: A history and forecast of ill health. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Schürer, Kevin (2007). Creating a nationally representative individual and household sample for Great Britain, 1851 to 1901—the Victorian panel study (VPS). Historical social research, 32(2), 211−331. Spaeth, Donald A. (2004). Representing text as data: The analysis of historical sources in XML. Historical methods, 37(2), 73−85.
477
Spurger-McQueen, C. M., & Burnard, Lou (2003). A gentle introduction to XML. http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/SG.html Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, accessed 30 April 2010. Steckel, R. H. (2009). A peculiar population: The nutrition, health, and mortality of American slaves from childhood to maturity. The journal of economic history, 46(3), 721−741. UNESCO. (2009). Memory of the world register. portal.unesco.org/ ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=1538&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html accessed January 2010. Wrigley, E. A., Davies, R. S., Oeppen, J. E., & Schofield, R. S. (1997). English population history from family reconstitution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.