We’re delighted to have received this timely guest post from long-time project friend and support Steve Jackson. It’s timely because, as Steve notes, it meshes nicely with this month’s focus on tragedies centred on a particular place. One of the virtues of our project is that it will increasingly allow us to take a place-based […]
Archive | Linking sources
What happened to William Watson?
In January 2021 we received a comment on one of our blog posts. Sid Harbour had contacted us, saying ‘I have just discovered your website. Could you please tell me if the info is searchable. My Grandfather lost his leg while working on the railway possibly 1900. We know the Family story how it happened […]
Use of Databases and Statistics in Historical Research
This post was contributed by one of our anonymous volunteers, who has been doing the fiddly but essential job of going over the data and trying to spot and correct issues. This means that they’ve seen pretty much all of the project data (including the 1000s of cases currently being prepared for public release). As […]
Robert Johnson – visualising disability
Some months ago I was sent an intriguing image by Robert Kitching of the Bowes Railway (whose guest post will be appearing soon!). The image showed a railwayman, supported by crutches and lacking both legs below the knee. Robert knew we’d be interested, especially since images of the workers involved in accidents are often hard […]
William Harwood’s missing leg
Continuing our Disability History Month exploration of the new Great Eastern Railway (GER) data (see last week’s post, here), this week we’re focusing on a cross-over case between our two datasets. We’re fortunate we can trace the moment of the accident for William Harwood as well as a little about what happened to him afterwards, […]
Who Was Cricpante Rego?
Around two weeks’ ago, we put out a request on our Twitter account to find out more about ‘Cricpante Rego’ – and as well as receiving some helpful ideas very quickly, one of our project volunteers, Chris Jolliffe, was inspired to dig further. She came up with this guest post, which reveals a fascinating story. […]
A World War Two case
So far we’ve largely confined ourselves to the cases found in our database, to give you more detail on a small – but increasing – number of the 3,915 individuals involved in accidents, and to demonstrate some of the value of our project. Today’s post, however, strays beyond existing territory – and is a precursor […]
Connecting people through the project
People are central to our project in so many ways. Obviously the railway staff who had the accidents, details of which we’re making more easily findable (via our database). Their families, too, as the accidents rarely simply affected one person. Their work colleagues also appear in the records. Behind the project work are several small […]
Irish Accident Records – untapped potential
In this guest post Norman Gamble, the Archivist of the Irish Railway Record Society (IRRS), introduces the Society and its archives – including the great potential offered by their holdings of staff accident registers. As yet these volumes are, like their British equivalents, unindexed and untapped – something we’d like to change, working with the […]
How Robert Henry Stanbury became Tylwch’s one-armed stationmaster
We were delighted to receive an email from this week’s guest author, Derek Savage, offering further information on one of the more intriguing cases from our database we’ve featured recently – an accident involving Robert Stanbury, though not one in which he himself was injured. Always happy to have such an offer, we gratefully accepted […]