In this week’s post, project volunter Philip James looks at some of the challenges of working with large quantites of data across a team of many people – and back to some of the potential problems with how the data was created in the first place. Philip is one of the team based with the […]
Tag Archives | guest post
The Life & Death of Thomas Hall
Last year the author of this guest post, Tom Hall, got in touch with us. Having found out about the project, he wanted to let us know about an accident that wouldn’t feature in our database as it was too early – the death of his Great Great Great Grandfather, Thomas Hall, in 1860. After […]
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 […]
Allocating accident investigations
In this post, project volunteer Brian Grainger, with the NRM team, raises some questions about the practicalities of the Board of Trade accident inspectors’ work. His previous post, here, delved into who the inspectors were. It’s therefore nice to welcome Brian back to the blog. When Brian put this together he was working on the […]
A Sad and Unusual Discovery in Family Research
By Enid Rispin on December 31, 2018 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution
We’re pleased to be able to feature another guest contribution, from family historian Enid Rispin looking back at the railway ancestors in her family – though with a tragic tale. It helps to illustrate the lasting damage of workplace accidents that stretched beyond the physical – something not generally revealed in the official accident reports, […]
Death of a platelayer
In this week’s post, guest author Rob Langham takes us back almost to birth of the railway age in England – a time when railways were rather more dangerous for passengers and, of course, staff than at the end of the century. The post arose from the research into his new book, The Stanhope & […]
An accident at Epping
This week we have a guest post from Philip James, looking at another accident he transcribed as part of his role as an NRM project volunteer. Here he puts the case in its local railway context, with a touching personal connection noted in the final image. Philip has written several posts for us already, found […]
Who Was Cricpante Rego?
By Chris Jolliffe on November 2, 2020 in Accident reports, Blog, Family History, Guest contribution, International, Linking sources
Around two weeks’ ago, we put out a request on our Twitter account to find out more about ‘Cricpante Rego’ – and as well as receiving some helpful ideas very quickly, one of our project volunteers, Chris Jolliffe, was inspired to dig further. She came up with this guest post, which reveals a fascinating story. […]
Life after an accident
By Pete Coveney on September 28, 2020 in Accident aftermath, Blog, Disability, Family History, Guest contribution
In this week’s post, we welcome a contribution from Pete Coveney. He was put on to us by long-time project friend and support, genealogist Jackie Depelle, as she thought we might be able to help him find out more about his father’s accident. Unfortunately everything we suggested didn’t lead to anything – so if you […]
Connecting people through the project
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 […]
