Founders and Survivors

Are you descended from a Tasmanian convict?

If so you will be interested in a new research project being undertaken by the University of Tasmania, which is looking into the lives of convicts transported to Tasmania.

Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context is a national collaboration between demographers, historians, epidemiologists and genealogists, who are examining birth, death and marriage records and other historical sources of Tasmanian convicts and their descents. The project is recording and studying the founding population of 73,000 men, women and children who were transported to Tasmania. The researchers are following mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, looking at life span, health, families, occupations and where they settled. They will then be connected with those that served in the AIF in World War 1 and compared with the service records of the male descendants of male convicts to investigate changes in height, childhood diet and health, and resilience under stress.

The project will produce the means of analysing the health and welfare of Australians over the past 200 years. This is a developing website, where increasing information is being released in searchable form. Even if you don’t have ancestors from this region, it is still a fascinating project to follow.