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A criminal ancestor

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Just discovered that at the 1881 census my great/great/grandad - Charles Roddis - was an inmate at Wakefield Prison.

He was a pen knife cutter in Sheffield, and in 1871 was living at Radleys or Radlings Yard in Allen Street.

Any ideas please on how I might find what crime he had committed?

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If you know anyone having a subscription to Find My Past, you can access newspapers for that period. Sheffield Indexers may also be able to help.

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To judge from newspaper reports a Charles Roddis of Sheffield seems to have served a number of short prison sentences in the 1870s/80s. Here is a report from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 14 July 1874. The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent of the same date specifies Wakefield as the prison where he was to serve one month. On 23 October 1879 the Sheffield Daily Telegraph included Charles Roddis in a list of "persons who were fined for infringement of the Education Act". Here is another report from the Sheffield Evening Telegraph of 9 July 1887.

Edited by hillsbro

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What a sad story but not an uncommon one. Thank god those days are over.

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Thank you for this information. A sorry tale, and amazing what you can discover about your ancestors. Although he lived in Sheffield he was born in West Bromwich, which possibly explains his conduct.

Pleased to say that his granddaughter (my maternal grandmother) was a law-abiding Methodist, who lived to be 96.

As far as I know no-one else in the family tree has a criminal record (so far).

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Thank you for this information. A sorry tale, and amazing what you can discover about your ancestors. Although he lived in Sheffield he was born in West Bromwich, which possibly explains his conduct.

Pleased to say that his granddaughter (my maternal grandmother) was a law-abiding Methodist, who lived to be 96.

As far as I know no-one else in the family tree has a criminal record (so far).

 

It doesn't bear thinking about really, times were hard and people acted according to their circumstances.

My 3x great grandfather (a Sheffield bloke) was transported to Australia for stealing cloth and handkerchiefs, presumably to support his family. He was forced to leave behind a wife and 2 young children.

It makes a rich tapestry for us family history folks to unpick!

Regards,

Duffems

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Yes, they were hard times and thank goodness things have changed. In 1863 my great-great-grandfather Mumby Betts, then aged 14, was given two weeks' hard labour for stealing gooseberries - see here.

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I discovered one of my ancestors was a murderer having had one too many beverages, riding his horse from Lincoln to Grantham and shooting his mistress at point blank range. He was one of the first 4 people in the world to be hanged by the long drop method and is buried in the grounds of Lincoln Castle.

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It doesn't bear thinking about really, times were hard and people acted according to their circumstances.

My 3x great grandfather (a Sheffield bloke) was transported to Australia for stealing cloth and handkerchiefs, presumably to support his family. He was forced to leave behind a wife and 2 young children.

It makes a rich tapestry for us family history folks to unpick!

Regards,

Duffems

 

My ancestor was also transported to Australia for killing his wife with a sand hammer. He died a poor and lonely man

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Thank you for this information. A sorry tale, and amazing what you can discover about your ancestors. Although he lived in Sheffield he was born in West Bromwich, which possibly explains his conduct.

Pleased to say that his granddaughter (my maternal grandmother) was a law-abiding Methodist, who lived to be 96.

As far as I know no-one else in the family tree has a criminal record (so far).

 

 

I could take offence, being a Black Country product myself, but I have recently found out that a thoroughly bad boy of a relative was born in Bilston, went into the Coldstream Guards when he was 18 then spent a decade in and out of the brig for (among other things) thumping a superior officer.. He came out of the brig for hospital treatment for gonorrhoea, syphillis and scabies, which as one of my friends put it, probably meant that he'd had a good weekend sometime.

 

 

 

He was then kicked in the back by a German officer's horse during a cavalry charge in 1915 and sent home injured, going in and out of hospital for a back injury that the doctors thought was made up, before being invalided out of the army to go and live with his new love, a widow who he then married, settling at 24 Bramall Lane, so clearly I was not the first member of my family to come to Sheffield :)

 

 

 

I find fleshing out all of these stories an ever-changing drama, and can lose hour after hour on the details. I've followed relatives all the way to Australia and found living relatives over there, as well as in Canada and Gibraltar too.

 

 

 

The sadness at finding the 17 year old boy who was acting as parent for his 4 younger siblings as well as working down the pit (with no sign of parents, although I have yet to work out what happened to them and how) is balanced out by finding that the farm next to the church in the hamlet where several relatives were baptised and buried still belongs to a living relative, over 200 years later.

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