This blog post was produced by University of Portsmouth History student Jenny Leng, as part of her work on the ‘Working with the Past’ module. The module asks students to work in groups on projects and to determine how they will present their findings; it gives them experience outside traditional degree work that will help […]
Archive | Local History
Death on the Railway in Victorian Peterborough
By Sophie Michell on May 30, 2022 in Blog, Events, Guest contribution, Local History, Suicide, Trespass, Urban History
This week’s guest post links nicely to last week’s, with its focus on Peterborough. Peterborough offers a great window onto death in the past, thanks to the survival of coroner’s inquest records – currently being used in her innovative and very exciting PhD study by this week’s author, Sophie Michell. This blog post comes from […]
James Spridgeon, Railway Platelayer: Accidentally Killed in 1880
By Rosie Rowley on May 23, 2022 in Accident aftermath, Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Local History, Urban History
This week’s blog post came about following a talk Mike gave at the U3A Family History Conference in Buxton in September 2019. Mike had a number of interesting conversations, including with this week’s guest author, Rosie Rowley. They discussed a case Rosie had found from her family history, also notable for the fact that the […]
An accident at Highbury & Is
This week we have another guest post from Philip James, part of the NRM team and our most prolific blog contributor – read his other posts here. Philip starts by giving us a bit of insight into both the project work and a potential direction for the future, before exploring one of the accident cases […]
Approaching the past, via E Beaumont
By Mike Esbester on July 12, 2021 in Accident reports, Approaches to the past, Blog, Family History, Linking sources, Local History
History and the past has been in the news a fair bit recently – notably controversies over culture wars, statues and how the past is understood, interpreted and presented. Clearly there aren’t static or universal understandings of the past. So how does our approach to the past and the sources we use shape the questions […]
A local history approach to E Beaumont
By Kathrina Perry on July 18, 2021 in Approaches to the past, Blog, Guest contribution, Local History
This post is one of a series exploring how the same source might be approached in different ways by different types of researcher, so we can better understand each other and work together more easily. There’s an introduction to this, and the associated posts like this one, here. Having previously researched bus services in Northamptonshire […]
William Charles Lilley
By Archie McDermott-Paintin on June 21, 2021 in Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Local History
This week our blog features a guest post from Archie McDermott-Paintin, a 2nd year History student at the University of Portsmouth. Archie worked with fellow student Marc Treloar (whose post was featured a couple of weeks’ ago) and project co-lead Mike Esbester on project data, including early access to our data release planned for later […]
John Rigby of Long Buckby Wharf
By Julie G on April 26, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Guest contribution, Local History
In today’s guest blog post, Julie G takes us back to a place-based approach. She’s interested in Long Buckby Wharf, in Northants – a transport hub, of sorts, with road, rail and canal links. Needless to say, that involved accidents, and she’s blogged about several – rail and canal – on her One Place Study […]
John Preece, his bravery, and his terrible injuries
By Steve Jackson on February 22, 2021 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
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 […]
Use of Databases and Statistics in Historical Research
By Mike Esbester on January 11, 2021 in Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, Linking sources, Local History
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 […]
