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 […]
Archive | Family History
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Filling in some more gaps
By Gordon Dudman on December 23, 2019 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Transcription Tuesday
As part of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ earlier this year, 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 […]
George Joseph Stuttaford (1855 – 1893)
By Martin O'Donnell on December 2, 2019 in Blog, Disability, Disability History Month, Family History, Guest contribution
In this guest post, former railway worker and now family historian Martin O’Donnell looks at one surprising accident he found in his family past. It dovetails neatly with Disability History Month, which runs from 22 November-22 December, and demonstrates once again that disability did not mean railway employment was out of the question. Sadly in […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
