ResearchBuzz

If you have English ancestry, an interest in your family’s history, and some patience, do I have a site for you. It’s a Web site aggregating the proceeding of the trials at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in England) from 1674-1913. This site covers almost 200,000 trials.

The site is running a bit slowly at the moment, and you may have to make several attempts before you can successfully run a search. . You can search by name, but you can also search by keyword or offense. A search for Smith found (after several attempts and lots of time outs) lots of results presented ten at a time, with the title and date of the case (” Judith Smith, defendant name in trial of Judith Smith, Theft > other, 11th December 1678.”) along with a bit of context.

The trial information page contains the content of the trial information. This can be as brief as a few paragraphs or as extensive as a lot of testimony. This selection concerning four eight-year-old boys who stole 48 bottles of ale is only one paragraph long.

In addition to seeing the transcript of legal proceedings, there’s also an option to see the original page of proceedings. (It’s a GIF image.) The one I managed to load was really really REALLY hard to read. I’ll stick to the transcripts.

This site is going to be a fun timesink, but it isn’t yet — it’s too slow and there are too many time out errors. I think I’ll come back in a week or so…

The state of Connecticut has put a database of over one million criminal convictions (dating back to January 1, 2000) online. Unlike some other states’ criminal conviction databases, this one also includes minor infractions like traffic offenses. You can search it at http://www.jud2.ct.gov/crdockets/SearchByDefDisp.aspx . Using it is free.

You can search by last name, first initial, year of birth and range of years (birth dates are not searchable and not displayed on the site) court location, and category type (criminal or motor vehicle.) Results are delivered in a table that includes defendant year, birth name, court, docket number, disposition (guilty, bond forfeit, etc.) and the sentencing date.

Clicking on a name provides a page that includes arresting officer’s name (sometimes it’s a name sometimes it’s a police department indicator), infraction and type, offense date, plea, verdict finding, date, and fines. (Yup, even down to the $35 speeding ticket.) Sometimes there is no fine, but there is sentencing information.

Be sure to check out the disclaimer for additional information on what is and isn’t included in this database, and how often it’s updated.

Business.gov — the government’s business portal/site/thing — announced today new state and local search capabilities. There’s an explanation page with several example searches at http://www.business.gov/about/search-engine.html .

Basically you can do a search and then add a zip code, county, or city name to your search and get “intelligent” results. You can mess with it if you want to (building permit springfield) but it seems to respond pretty well to zip codes and full location information (electrical code 90210).

State browsing is still available if you want to get larger sets of information, but you know what I’d really like to see? I’d like to see an on-the-fly list of Web sites that come up when you do a search. For example, if I do a search for restaurant inspections Santa Monica CA I’d like to see a list that reads something like: “The information presented here was pulled from the following sites: lacounty.info, smgov.net,” and so on, so I would have some places to start if I wanted to pursue the matter further.