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 Life hoping to find out more – hopefully she did about the […]
Archive | Linking sources
The death of Joseph (Joe) Parkin & its impact on his family
By Gordon Dudman on September 30, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
As part of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’, 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 of the transcribers, Gordon […]
We want your accidents!
Well – hopefully not your own accidents, but we are interested in any cases of accidents to railway workers in the past about which you have information. Read on to find out more – including a request for your help! Followers on Twitter will have seen our call a few weeks’ ago for suggestions of […]
John Haughton: the life and death of a railwayman
By Neil Gordon on August 12, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
We’re really pleased to be able to feature this guest blog post from Neil Gordon – it’s always heartening to receive contributions, but this is particularly interesting one, written by a descendent of the worker, John Haughton, at the centre of the piece. We met Neil at the Family Tree Live show, where he mentioned […]
Reading 1914: passengers, workers, family
Our project has focused on accidents to railway workers, rather than passengers, as numerically far more workers were killed or injured on the railways and they remain understudied. When we started out, in 2016, we were using just one set of records – the Board of Trade reports into worker accidents. We took the decision […]
Volunteers’ Week 5: The fatal dangers of shunting
By Cheryl Hunnisett on June 5, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Volunteers’ Week
In the latest of our Volunteers’ Week posts, project volunteer Cheryl Hunnisett, working with us at the Modern Records Centre, takes a look at one case she encountered in the records of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants trade union. This is another great example of the ways in which our volunteers are actively taking […]
Edward Gevaux: one accident in a wider life
In this guest blog post, Peter Bloomfield was able to use our database to add further detail to his existing research into North London Railway (NLR) staff, via the case of Edward Gevaux. There are several other NLR staff that appear in Peter’s database and ours, further demonstrating the possibilities for linking research undertaken for […]
Female gatekeepers killed by trains 1846-1906.
In this guest post, Helena Wojtczak explores fatal accidents to women working on and living around the railway, particularly those women either paid and employed as gatekeepers or those women engaged in an ‘informal economy’ and carrying out work on behalf of their husbands who were otherwise indisposed when required. In doing so, Helena gives […]
Spidery scrawl and good eyesight
Back in November we released our second set of project data – details of around 500 Great Eastern Railway (GER) staff and former staff, between them making about 600 applications to the GER Benevolent Fund for support following an accident at work. The applications were made between 1913 and 1923, but as the data showed, […]
J Moore (a shunter)
By Chris Jolliffe on April 15, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
In this post, Chris Jolliffe, one of the project volunteers based at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick and transcribing trade union records, picks up on one case that emerged from the ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event. In it, she delves deeper into the sources to pull together a much more complete picture of […]
