In this post I present an example of how difficult it can be to research Australian convicts, because records are not always perfect and only persistence and some creative searching might get you a result.
One of Joseph Wilkes’ friends was a man named Jeremiah Buffey or Buffy. I was looking for his hulk records, and this one was a bit of a challenge.
The hulk records can be conveniently searched on Ancestry.com, but my initial searches were unsuccessful. Even the fuzzy search options didn’t bring up any relevant similar names.
But I knew Jeremiah Buffey had to have been on one of the hulks before being shipped to the other side of the world, so I figured there could have been some kind of transcription error.
I did know that Jeremiah was convicted in 1812 and arrived in Australia on the Earl Spencer in late 1813. That information, I figured, might just be enough.
Since the Last Name field was not giving me any useful results in this instance, I opted for the first name, and the approximate conviction date.
Bingo!
As it turned out, this man was indexed as Bufty, instead of Buffy or Buffey.
Honestly, if I had transcribed this record, I probably would have interpreted the handwriting as ‘Bufty’ too.
In this instance it seems likely that the error happened, for whatever reason, at the time the source record was created.