In this guest post, Francis Howcutt recounts the accidental death of Arthur Bott, a brother of his great grandfather. Arthur’s history is an example of how the railways helped provide the children of agricultural labourers with opportunities beyond their ancestral villages, as well as the associated dangers. One of the particularly nice things about this […]
Archive | Linking sources
Transcription Tuesday themes
Following up on last week’s blog post which looked at some cases from our newest data release, we thought it would be worth looking at a few themes that appear in the data. This comes ahead of 2020’s Transcription Tuesday – hopefully it’ll turn out as well for all involved this year as it did […]
A few ASRS cases from our new dataset
By Mike Esbester on January 29, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
Just over a month ago, we released our third dataset – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) legal book, covering 1901-1905. It contains over 2000 cases in which the ASRS had an interest, around half of which were accidents. The data came from the 2019 ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event which the project took part in, […]
Romance is Dead: Glasgow Railway Workers, Burns and Hospital Treatment at the Cusp of the Twentieth Century
By Rebecca Wynter on January 20, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Medical humanities
We’re delighted to feature this guest post, from Rebecca Wynter, one of the team working on the excellent ‘Forged by Fire’ project, looking at burns prevention and treatment over a 200 year period. They’re doing important work to open up all sorts of avenues into a neglected topic, and so it’s great that where there […]
Light Railway Accident 17 January 1918 – The Death of Sapper Hay
By Sandra Gittins on January 13, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Guest contribution, Linking sources, War
In her research, Sandra Gittins has already turned up a couple of cases of accidents to railway staff serving overseas during World War One – and we’re very grateful that she’s blogged about them for us, here and here. In this post, she has uncovered the circumstances surrounding one further – dramatic – case. We […]
2020 plans & possibilities …
… and a case from our new data release, for good measure! As we start 2020 it seems like a good time to look ahead to what’s to come this year – and the answer is: lots! Some of it is bespoke: unique events to which we’ve been invited to contribute. We’re always pleased […]
Filling in some more gaps
By Gordon Dudman on December 23, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
As part of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ earlier this year, our project made available a set of records produced by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, one of the major railway trade unions. It listed over 2000 cases involving members, many of them accidents. In this blog post, one […]
New dataset! ASRS legal cases, 1901-1905
By Mike Esbester on December 17, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
From Tralee and Belfast to Inverness, and Wrexham to Ashford and Penzance, our newest data release shows the impact of staff railway accidents in the early 20th century – and the ways in which one of the major trade unions, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), defended workers. The cases come from a record […]
Improvising to work with a disability
By Mike Esbester on December 9, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Linking sources
In the course of looking for something else in our database of British and Irish railway worker accidents, I recently stumbled across a fascinating case that gives us a little glimpse of the ways in which disability was a common part of everyday life on the railways. We could read this as a positive: in […]
George Page (1845 – 1899)
By Sue Page on October 14, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
In this guest blog post, Sue Page looks at the life & death of her Great Grandfather and the impact it had on his family over a longer period. Sue came along to the workshop session the project put on at Family Tree Live hoping to find out more – hopefully she did about the […]
