Ann McGovern - A Well Travelled Criminal

Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives holds two volumes containing mugshots: the 'Register of Returned Convicts' for Aberdeen covering 1869-1939 contains 61 images, while a much larger album holds over 930 images taken at HM General Prison, Perth, in the early 1880s. Only two individuals appear in both - Ann McGovern being one of them. I was very familiar with her full-length photograph which appears in the first of these volumes (above) so the discovery of her mugshot in the Perth Prison album (below) had me falling off my chair in surprise, but it was unmistakably her.

The first photograph relates to a crime that Ann committed in 1868. The 'Huntly Express' of Saturday 18th April 1868 reported her trial as follows,

“Ann McGovern is not unknown to our readers, having been convicted at a Justice of the Peace Court, Huntly, on 26th August 1865, and sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment for stealing a pair of ladies’ boots from the shop of Mr Yule, shoemaker, here. She now goes “over the water” for a theft committed in the city of Aberdeen”.

The details that accompany Ann's image in the Register of Returned convicts for Aberdeen (see below) show that she was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude for the theft committed in the 'Granite City'.

The details also state that she was 51 on her release on Christmas Day 1872. Using these two pieces of information, I was able to find her on the 1871 census, as a prisoner at HM General Prison, Perth. The census return further reveals that her occupation was that of a "hawker's wife" suggesting that she was used to an itinerant lifestyle. 

By searching other census returns, a picture of Ann's well-travelled existence begins to emerge: in 1851 we find her at an address off the Cowgate in Edinburgh where she is listed as an unmarried "milliner and itinerant maker of women's caps". Her birthplace is given as Ireland, so she was almost certainly part of the great wave of Irish immigrants to Scotland in the wake of the Irish Potato Famine.

Come the 1861 census and we find Ann married to a John McGovern, whose occupation is given as a "scavenger". They are living at Calton, just east of the Trongate in Glasgow. As we have already discovered from the report in the Huntly Express, sometime between 1861 and 1865, Ann travels north and ends up in trouble in Huntly and then Aberdeen.

After her release on Christmas Day 1872, we know that she lived for a short period of time at the lodging house at 45 Guestrow, Aberdeen. In April 1873 however, the Register of Returned Convicts records that she was sentenced to eight years' penal servitude for theft. 

This pattern of incarceration continues for the rest of Ann's life: although the 1881 census reveals that she is by then widowed and living as a 'housekeeper' with her niece, a shopkeeper, on Union Street in Dundee, we know from the details accompanying her 1883 mugshot that she was convicted in December 1882 and by the time of the 1891 census she is back inside HM General Prison, Perth, aged 70.