Court records can be a valuable source of information for family historians. Early trial records can be scant but newspaper accounts often compensate. The following should prove useful for criminal and civil prosecutions.
What is online?
Lower Court records
The majority of lower court petty session records have been digitised up to 1900. Do an
agency search for your district (e.g. Bothwell Lower Court) and then look for ‘petty sessions’ in the list of records. To find lower court districts, you can start by putting just "lower court" in the agency title field.
Supreme Court records
Crown Law Criminal Cases
What else is there?
Criminal cases
Crown Law records
Apart from being of interest in their own right, these are useful because the
Supreme Court criminal files (SC81) before 1951 have not survived.
Crown Law prosecutes cases in the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court records
Civil cases
Notes
Only files older than 75 years from today are available without permission from the
Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
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Trove for accounts of court appearances. For the Colonial period these accounts are often more informative than the surviving Court records.
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Guide to prison records
What can I find from other organisations?