The once infamous 'Highland Hotel Robbers' are among Victorian prisoners whose records are now online.
Scotland's People, the official site for Scottish government records, has published details of more than 100,000 inmates from Ayr and Inveraray jails.
In the summer of 1883, American James Edward Lyon and his young accomplice Eliza Thorpe targeted well-to-do guests in fancy hotels from Argyll to Aberdeenshire. Cash, jewellery and other valuables went missing and Lyon and Thorpe just always seemed to be around when it happened.
The pair who travelled as man and wife were arrested at a hotel in Edinburgh. Their associate Joseph Dowling was caught red handed with some of the stolen items. At their trial the men were convicted but the case against Thorpe, who was 20 years old, was found not proven. Lyon was sentenced to seven years. Photographs of Lyon, Thorpe and Dowling were kept in an album of interesting cases by the local procurator fiscal.
Their entries in the register for Inveraray prison are among 4,600 for that jail now on Scotland’s People. Men, women and children were incarcerated at the jail in the 19th century. The youngest was seven year old James McCulloch who was caught stealing, the oldest 82-year-old Ann Kerr found guilty of “vagrancy”.
The newly published records also include 98,000 entries from Ayr Prison from 1841 to 1911. Notable prisoners included murderers Joseph Calabrese, Thomas Bone and Mary Boyd. All of them were sentenced to death and all spared.
Archivist Veronica Schreuder said:
“Prison registers are a rich source of information for social researchers and family historians alike.
“While it can be a shock to find an ancestor in prison, it can sometimes lead to details that are unlikely to have been preserved for most people.
“Finding out the colour of their hair, details of their health or whether they could read or write can turn a name and some dates into a much more rounded person. And of course, if they have committed a serious crime, it can explain a lot about the decisions of other relatives such as moving area, changing a name or simply never talking about them.”
The new additions mean there are now over 400,000 historical prison records available to search on Scotland’s People. This includes the old Edinburgh prisons, Barlinnie, Perth and Largs. Histories of both prisons and more on the cases highlighted in this story are available at Scotland’s People.
