I've been asked to give the following collaborative initiative seeking to make more easily available details of accidents to British and Irish railway workers before 1939:
Your railway ancestor’s accident?
The railways were one of Britain and Ireland’s biggest employers for much of the 19th and 20th centuries – meaning many of us have one or more railway workers in our family trees. What hasn’t been commonly known is that railway work could be very dangerous – and that some of the accidents that resulted have left records useful to us as family historians.
Since 2016 the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project has been working on making these pre-1939 records more easily available – and from mid-July will be making 16,000 additional cases available as part of its free database, found on the project website. All together the database will then contain over 21,000 cases between 1900 and 1939, all transcribed by the project’s excellent volunteers. The records tell us about the people involved, what they were doing, when, where and why, and help us understand working life and accidents on the railways.
The project is a joint initiative of the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, working with The National Archives. It wants to see the information it’s making available being used by you, in your research - it's all available free, from the project website. They're also keen to hear from you if you find someone you're researching, so please let them know.
www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk
Twitter: @RWLDproject
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Railway-Work-Life-Death-108745674380484
(With thanks to Mike Esbester)
Chris
My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.
An interesting project; my 2 * great grandfather James Headridge worked at Caledonian Railway Station in Glasgow and died when his foot got stuck in the tracks and he was run over by a carriage in 1884.
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