Our Criminal Past: Our Criminal Ancestors

This project encourages and supports people and communities to explore the criminal past of their own families, towns and regions. In this project we interpret 'criminal' broadly to mean people who have (historically) encountered the criminal justice system. This might include the accused, victims, witnesses, prisoners, police and prison-officers, amongst others. Moreover, the project will reveal that 'Our Criminal Ancestors' were often ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. It will allow a greater understanding of the difficult situations that often led to individuals, and sometimes groups of people, encountering the criminal justice system. Hence, criminal ancestors might include, not only pickpockets, shop-lifters and horse-thieves, but also vagrants, drunkards, debtors and political protestors. Through this project, we hope that the public will gain greater understanding not only of their own family history, but also the history of the communities, towns and regions in which they live and work.

Consequently, this project is characterised by a desire to encourage and facilitate public engagement with crime history. It will do this through knowledge exchange, interactive workshops and website dissemination. This will be achieved through engaging with our 'criminal past' as local communities, regions and nationally, primarily through a collective interest in our criminal ancestors. A central aim of the project, is to share knowledge and expertise which will support the public in finding, interpreting and using criminal records and to trace their criminal ancestors; in other words, it will promote creative interaction between academic researchers and the public. Hull's City of Culture status will act as an initial vehicle for the project. However, the project reaches beyond the city of Hull and/or the region, and the website will have both national and international impact. Whilst the collaboration with Hull History Centre and the engagement events are central to the evolution of the project, it is our intention to develop a set of resources with the potential to engender longer-term and wider public engagement.

This will be achieved through the following objectives: 1) three interactive public engagement workshops with our partners, the Hull History Centre, in Hull during City of Culture Year 2017; 2) establishing and maintaining an interactive and open access website which guides, assists and directs members of public, from across the World, with tracing their criminal ancestors in the UK - this would provide free expert advice from leading researchers in the field; 3) creating and producing a detailed source guide on the use of criminal records and identifying the national and most important local collections held at the Hull History Centre and in the East Riding; and 4) to develop a blueprint for 'Criminal Ancestors' workshops which is innovative, flexible and portable, and will (alongside the website) encourage and facilitate future interactions and creative engagement with user communities.

Public engagement fundamentally underpins this project. The project first builds on the existing element of engagement which we started to develop as an unintended outcome of our previous AHRC-funded project, Our Criminal Past: Caring for the Future (AH/K005766/1). The impact of that project was focussed directly on working with heritage and educational professionals. Heritage professionals in particular are concerned with the way in which their presentation of the criminal past, translates to a public audience in terms of creative engagement and knowledge exchange. It was out of lively discussions around these issues that our current project emerged. Thus the current project both addresses and engenders public engagement but also creates longer-term potential for impact. The project secondly builds on the City of Culture status which will be held by Hull throughout 2017. Transformative culture and diversity are key elements in the planning for the City of Culture, and we believe that our workshops will provide a positive contribution to the cultural programme for the year. Moreover, it will enable local residents and members of the public with regional connections and an interest in local and regional history, to gain a greater knowledge and understanding of their past. Thus, interaction with the public is at the heart of the workshop sessions. The PI and CI will 'enable' the public to develop their skills as researchers, thus providing a concrete benefit to our user community. Immediate feedback to the workshops will be captured by paper surveys, followed up by online surveys. This feedback from the first workshop event, will then shape the following two workshops. In this way, direct engagement with the public will feed into the way in which we run the events. In order to attract a broad public audience we will draw on our existing network and social media contacts to provide advance publicity and dissemination about the events. We will also work with the Hull History Centre and local press and media organisations to publicise the events (for example, through BBC Radio Humberside who have featured the PI's recent book Victorian Convicts: 100 Criminals of the Victorian Age). Both engagement and impact will be sustained and developed through the website resource. The website will engender further creative and innovative engagement through its Media Wiki and interactive tools such as the MapMe plugin. This will enable the public to be more effective researchers, and to provide them with a forum to tell rich stories about their own research, is both central to our vision for the website. The website will disseminate the smaller-scale local research (undertaken at the workshops at the Hull History Centre) to a much wider audience. Whilst during the funded period, this will involve considerable input from the PI and CI (see Justification for Resources), our hope is that by effectively 'crowdsourcing' content, in the longer term the website will be sustained and developed as partnership with contributors. The use of the website, visitors and other activity will be captured and measured by plugins such as Google Analytics. Finally, in the longer term the portability of the workshop resource, along with the website, means that there is great potential for engagement and impact in other cities and regions. Our vision for the project, and its longer-term life, is to create a sustainable engagement resource which enables family and local historians to understand and contextualise the stories of their criminal ancestors in the social histories of their communities. The outcomes of the project will be as follows:
Our Criminal Ancestors interactive website (impact measured through Google Analytics)
Three interactive public engagement workshops (impact measured by paper/online survey)
Source guide on criminal records produced (in hard copy and as pdf) in collaboration with Hull History Centre
Portable 'Blueprint' Workshop Resource.