Find Scots and Irish folk who worked in shipbuilding in Barrow-in-Furness

FindmyPast (www.findmypast.co.uk) has a new collection that may be of interest if your Scottish or Irish families had connections to shipbuilding in Barrow-In-Furness, Lancashire, including both male and female ancestors and relatives involved in the trade (or indeed, English family members who spent time in Scotland or Ireland). This is the description as given on the site:

Lancashire, Barrow-in-Furness Shipbuilding & Engineering Employees
https://search.findmypast.co.uk/search-world-records/lancashire-barrow-in-furness-shipbuilding-and-engineering-employees

These records, compiled by staff and volunteers from staff registers and records held by Barrow Archive and Cumbria Archive Service, include the names of the men and women employed or were apprenticed at the Barrow in Furness shipyard in Lancashire 1890s-1950s and the women who were employed to work at Vickers during the First World War. Information found could include –

• First names(s)
• Last name
• Date of birth
• Department employed in
• Job role
• Address
• Age
• Date they entered service
• Date they left service

The records are indexes, with comments also available for some entries. For example, this is an entry for a gent called Balchandra Nagesh, who started work in Barrow in 1932, with the record adding that he was previously "With John Brown & Co, Glasgow from 29/04/1930 to 12/12/1931":

Amongst the employees listed there are several mentions of women who were serving apprenticeships in connection to firms in Belfast and Glasgow, for example, as well as many employees from both cities. Barrow was part of a triangle of operations between the north-west of England, Belfast and Glasgow, with employees regulalrly flitting between the three areas for employment opportunities. As a rivetter, my own great great grandparents from Belfast got married in Barrow in 1881 - and in possibly the most obscure genealogy fact that you'll ever read connected to Scottish and Irish history, I myself was conceived in a house there (my parents were posted there when my Dad was in the Navy), before being hatched back in Larne! 

It should be noted that FindmyPast's blog post description of this title at https://www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/new/women-shipbuilding is a little misleading - it does not exclusively document female employees from the First World War period, the collection predominantly features male employees, but it is certainly useful for finding women who worked there during the war. 

The records are sourced from the Cumbria Archive Service, with collection accession numbers included in the respective entries.

Chris

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