You may think you're the proverbial "black sheep" in your family, but one of your forebears might have an even spottier record... and that record might run through Alcatraz. Ancestry.com has finished digitizing records for all 1,575 inmates who were ever incarcerated at the island fortress in San Francisco Bay during its 29 years as a civilian federal prison. Residents of Alcatraz included gangster Al Capone, who was sent there from Leavenworth in Kansas to serve even harder time. (In its history, Alcatraz was also a military prison, and was occupied for 19 months by American Indian protesters.)
The database also covers the federal prisons at Leavenworth, Atlanta and McNeil Island.The physical records from Alcatraz rest at a branch of the National Archives in San Bruno. That's lucky for Bay Area residents who may want to see their relatives' original records, says Quinton Jackson, the website's director of content acquisition who negotiated this deal.
"You can... get the actual casefile, which may be up to 700 pages long about any one individual, along with a mugshot," said Atkinson. Listen to Joshua Johnson's interview with Ancestry.com's Quinton Atkinson: