FIND OUT MORE
Get involved! We’re always keen to hear if you find someone you’re researching in our database, especially if you can fill in more details of their life and times. We regularly publish guest blog posts like this, so just get in touch! Find out more at www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk or on Twitter @RWLDproject
Accidents might not seem like the most promising of family history topics – but as we’ve been finding on the Railway Work, Life & Death (RWLD) project, they can tell us a lot about the people involved and their working lives. That’s important, as many of us have ancestors who worked on Britain and Ireland’s railways. Around the time of World War I, these railways employed nearly 640,000 people. Tragically, it was also a dangerous workplace: in 1913 alone, nearly 30,000 people were injured or killed. Those accidents produced a huge quantity of records, which the RWLD project is transcribing and making freely available, via our website: www. railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk.