Dear List Thanks to Ancestry, I discovered from the 1861 census that my errant great grandfather, Charles Crosby ROTHWELL, born Warwick 1851, was listed as an "orphan" in the Southwark Industrial School belonging to the parish of St George the Martyr, Southwark although the school itself was in Mitcham, Surrey. However, the 1861 census also shows that his widowed mother, Mary (his father had died in 1848) was still living in Smith Street, Warwick, along with her other surviving children: James, Sarah and Elizabeth. I wonder why it was that he was taken away from his family in Warwick and sent so far away? Were there no industrial schools nearer? The admission and discharge records for Mitcham School are held at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) but I couldn't find an entry for him amongst them. The records are incomplete and there is a gap for the period from July 1860 to September 1862 and he may well have fallen down it. >From a description in the LMA's list to the Surrey Quarter Sessions records, I found the following useful description: REFORMATORIES AND INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS A similar system of state certification of industrial schools, which provided industrial training to young offenders, was established by the Industrial Schools Act 1857 (20 & 21 Vic, cap.48). The Act empowered magistrates to send vagrant children to such certified schools. This power was extended by the Act of 1861 (24 & 25 Vic, cap.113) to children under 14 brought before a magistrate for begging, vagrancy, destitution, frequenting the company of thieves, or for being refractory and out of the control of their parents, and to children under 12 charged with a punishable offence but for whom training in a industrial school was a more appropriate sentence. By the Industrial Schools Act of 1866 (29 & 30 Vic, cap.118) justices of the peace, as the prison authority for the County, might make grants to such schools and contracts for the reception of children of the County. I am also aware of Peter Higginbotham's excellent www.workhouses.org website, which gives a lot of useful background about individual industrial schools as well as workhouses. Does anyone know if I might find information about why my great grandfather was exiled to Mitcham amongst the Warwick Quarter Sessions records, or are there other local records I should check? Best wishes Graham