Last year we blogged about some of the railway staff who were injured at work and then went on to fight and die in the First World War. They appear in both our database and the NRM’s Fallen Railwaymen database, also put together by volunteers. We identified 11 men who cross over like this, including […]
Archive | Blog
Do as I say, not as I do!
How did railway employees learn their craft in the late 19th century and on into the 20th? For most grades it was by learning on the job, from more experienced colleagues. That created all sorts of things – not least a sense of craft identity, and an understanding of what was necessary in order to […]
3 weeks, 3 audiences
October, it turns out, has been a busy month for us. Over the course of 3 weeks we’ve participated in events involving 3 of our key target audiences: the rail industry, family historians and academics. By way of a project update, this blog post summarises a few of the aspects of each of the events. […]
Dowler’s double – with under 3 months between them
We return to one of the great things about our database for today’s blog post: the way it makes it possible to search the accident records more easily and identify links that might otherwise be missed. One way we’ve shown this in the past has been via the ‘double accidents’: those where a single person […]
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 Life hoping to find out more – hopefully she did about the […]
Not learning from past experience – with fatal consequences
We’ve blogged in the past about those cases in our database where staff had two accidents (see here for the most recent of those posts). This week we return to another such case: Great Northern Railway porter George Lewis of Leicester. The first time he appears in our database was for an accident on 27 […]
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 […]
Thoughts on collaboration: the start of a manifesto?
Last Saturday, as I arrived home from the U3A Family History Conference, I spotted a discussion on Twitter that was sad to read. Else Churchill, genealogist at the Society of Genealogists, had been at a different conference. Whereas my experience was very positive – as an academic I’d been warmly welcomed and enjoyed engaging with […]
On Funding, Heroism and Family History
There’s never a dull moment for us, but the last couple of weeks have been particularly busy. On top of the usual things, we’ve submitted a funding application and spoken at 2 conferences. This blog post will round up some of the key points! The funding application first. It went to the British Academy, and […]
A lucky escape and a relief
In the course of the project work, our volunteers have found a huge range of stories that feed into our database. Some are quirky, many tragic, and the odd one or two involved relative good fortune (by and large – in that the results might have been a lot worse than transpired). One that falls […]
