The face in the sepia photograph is taut and strained, the glare fixed and defiant – for who knows the trials Mary Morrison had already undergone in life before her conviction at Manchester assize courts on 16 July 1883? Nearly 130 years on, her portrait, attached to her prison record, is one of hundreds of Victorian female prisoners placed online for the first time by a genealogy website.

Morrison, 40 and a servant, was convicted of throwing acid in the face of her estranged husband after she had confronted him at his workplace in Ancoats in the city, demanding that he pay her her weekly allowance.

The tale is told in a single newspaper paragraph pasted next to her photograph: "He promised to give it to her in a day or two but she said that would not do for her and, taking from under her shawl a jug containing undiluted sulphuric acid, she threw [it] at her husband saying: 'Take that. I'll make you worse than you are'."

The Ancestry.co.uk website is publishing 4,400 parole records with 500 photographs of some of the prisoners sentenced in the mid-19th century. They sit demurely in their uniforms, with white pinafores, some wearing mob caps, hair parted in the middle, hands spread in front of their stomachs: murderers and thieves, some of the latter sentenced to savage prison terms for the most minor of crimes.

There is Elizabeth Murphy, 19, sentenced at Salford sessions to five years' penal servitude to be followed by seven years' police supervision, apparently for stealing an umbrella; Elizabeth Burk, who got seven years' hard labour for taking a piece of ribbon; and 45-year-old Dorcas Snell, who received five years with hard labour in 1883 for the theft of a piece of bacon. The youngest – an 11-year-old called Ann McQuillan – received four years for housebreaking; the oldest, Ann Dalton, 76, five years for stealing two sheets. Murphy and Dalton both served three years before being released.

Sentences were frequently reduced. The online records concern parole licences and show that all 56 murderers listed had their death penalties commuted to imprisonment instead.

They included Elizabeth Ann Staunton, 29, found guilty in September 1877 of murdering Harriet Staunton, her brother-in-law's wife, who was starved to death at a house in Kent. The Victorians were reluctant to hang women and there was sufficient forensic doubt for both her and her brother-in-law to be reprieved after their convictions. A neat copperplate note records: "Her Majesty having been graciously pleased to extend her grace and mercy unto said Elizabeth Ann Staunton and to grant her a pardon … on condition of her being kept in penal servitude for the term of her natural life."

In the event she served only six years – probably a shorter term than she would have received today. The file contains a letter from her mother about the campaign to free her, which she was not allowed to see.

Staunton may have been released early because she intervened when a warder was attacked. The parole licence notes laconically that in 1879 "this prisoner rendered prompt assistance in protecting an assistant matron when assaulted … in the Protestant chapel during divine service".

There are two photographs of her attached to her record: one, looking cowed in civilian clothes, probably after her arrest; the other, later, older and more robust, in her prison uniform.

Morrison, the acid thrower, was sentenced to five years' penal servitude for her attack on her husband, but freed from Fulham convict prison on licence "to reside at the East End Refuge, Finchley" after two and a half. The newspaper report of her conviction noted that her husband had been severely burned about the face, arms and body, with clothes all damaged. It added: "Before the assault he could see fairly well, although he was near-sighted, and now he can scarcely see at all."