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 […]
Archive | Family History
Percy Abbott of Salisbury, his father William and a 1930s accident
We’re delighted that this week’s post is from a guest author, Chris Abbott. We met at the Family Tree Live event last year and he’s been good enough to put this blog post together. In it, he draws upon his family’s experiences of railway work and railway accidents; particularly nice is that his father was […]
From Gofa to Warden Law – the Death of a Ranter
Earlier this year we put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone would like to write a guest blog post – this kind of contributory work is important to our project, and we enjoy seeing people get involved. We were therefore very pleased to have a quick response, from Jo Boutflower, author of […]
How Robert Henry Stanbury became Tylwch’s one-armed stationmaster
By Derek Savage on June 22, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
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 […]
Jonathan Rogers: only a year on the railways
In this guest post, Linda Whitaker has kindly written up the death of one of her ancestors, Jonathan Rogers. His accident was one of the many that took place before records of staff accidents were kept, so it’s great to be able to get some information about his case which otherwise wouldn’t feature in the […]
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 […]
Arthur Bott’s final walk
By Francis Howcutt on February 24, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
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 […]
Bartholomew Stephenson – from pub landlord to permanent way worker
By John Davison Cameron on April 1, 2019 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources
We’re pleased to be able to feature another guest post, from another person the project has been able to help. John contacted us via our feedback form to let us know that he’d made use of the project database and found it useful – something we always like to hear, so do get in touch […]
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, […]
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 […]
