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 […]
Tag Archives | fatality
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 […]
Dernancourt (Somme) railway accident, 1918
In this post, guest contributor Sandra Gittins brings us back to the First World War, when accidents to railway staff didn’t stop. She’s already blogged about a case which led to an injury for a railwayman on active service in France (here); this time, sadly, 2 fatalities resulted. As always, we’re very happy to receive […]
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 […]
A runaway engine, a dismissed driver & a no show
The lot of the Railway Inspector wasn’t always a happy one. Finding out what happened in an accident was never going to be an easy task: sometimes they were unwitnessed, sometimes those involved were uncooperative for fear of being implicated in rule-breaking, and sometimes they key players were unavailable. In a previous blog we’ve discussed […]
Heatwave! July 1911
The UK is currently undergoing a very warm spell, with today, 25 July, looking like it’s going to be the hottest day of the year so far. Searching our database to see if there were any hot weather cases, we found two in which the heat was mentioned as a possible factor. Both were in […]
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 […]
Volunteers’ Week 4: One NRM volunteer’s experiences
In our fourth Volunteers’ Week blog post, National Railway Museum volunteer Philip James outlines some of what working on the project involves, and one case from our ongoing interwar extension which caught his eye. We’re indebted to Philip, who has been with us since the start and is now working on the third set of […]
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 […]
