FAMILY historians, teachers, crime writers and academics can now follow the lives of people convicted and transported to Australia or imprisoned in Britain using a vast, free online resource.

Created by researchers, including a team from Oxford University, the Digital Panopticon website draws on over four million records to allow users to uncover how punishment affected the lives of 90,000 individuals convicted of crimes at the Old Bailey between 1780 and 1925.

This includes those uprooted by the UK criminal justice system to carry out their sentence in the British Empire’s penal colonies in Australia.

Professor Deborah Oxley of Oxford University’s Faculty of History, who was one of the lead investigators, said the database would prove a key tool for historians explaining: "One of the biggest puzzles we can try to solve is who was actually sent to Australia.

"Many people sentenced to transportation never left Britain. We want to know who was chosen, and hopefully why. By building these stories, and those of people subjected to other punishments, such as imprisonment, we can understand the long-term consequences of different types of punishments, including what led to reform.

"This website brings together a huge investment in building many different historical databases, and it is very exciting to see how digital history is opening up new ways of understanding the past."

The new resource also includes data from genealogy sites FindMyPast and Ancestry, as well as the National Archives and record collections in Australia.