Search railway employment records
Think your ancestors may have been train drivers or navvies? Nick Peers explains how to…
Employment records provide valuable data about our ancestors’ working lives. Nowhere more so than in the millions of railway employment records that date from the mid-19th century to the mid-1950s.
You may already suspect you have railways workers in your tree through family lore, or you might already have evidence to support the notion: their occupation as recorded in the census, for example. You might even suspect purely based on where they lived: my ancestors lived in Nantwich, then moved to nearby Crewe in the 1870s to work on the rapidly expanding railway.
Start with Ancestry’s records
Your first stop should be Ancestry’s card catalogue. Go to www.snipca.com/32932 and type railway into the Title search box (see screenshot right) to reveal a series of collections related to people working on the railways.
The UK Railway Employment Records is the main database for providing work-related information about your ancestors. And the standout collection is the one from 1833-1956, with over two million records spanning most of the major railway companies that operated prior to nationalisation in 1948.
Click the collection title to perform a direct search: enter your ancestor’s name and relevant details (such as a birth and death date) and it will return a series of results. You can review these by clicking the record for a brief description, but you’ll learn much more by reviewing the actual image itself.
You should find multiple entries for each person: starting work, transferring and leaving. In the case of my greatgreat-grandfather Frederick Peers his records revealed that he died aged 65 while still an employee of the railways (see screenshot above right).
Railway work was often kept in the family. Frederick’s son Frederick Jr followed him into the railways, and the records reveal his entire career from joining as a 14-year-old apprentice in 1888 to transferring from Crewe to Brighton, where he became a locomotive boiler maker before emigrating to the US.
I later tracked down his tragically early death (in 1909, aged just 25) to Philadelphia through Familysearch. I was able to confirm the match through his listed occupation on the death certificate: boiler maker.
Check injuries, deaths and magazines
Other useful record sets at Ancestry include a register of injuries and deaths for 1911-1915 (see www.railwayaccidents. port.ac.uk for more details), plus narrower databases, including company magazines from the period. Smaller collections can be found on paid-for websites: visit www. snipca.com/32929 to search The Genealogist’s collection of records and magazines, covering the Great Western and Great Northern railway companies.
Two other excellent sources of background material are The Railway Archive ( www.railwayarchive.org.uk) and Railway Museum ( www.railwaymuseum. org.uk). Both provide valuable insight into an overlooked group: the navvies who helped build 3,000 miles of railway.
No employment records exist, so check their occupation on various censuses to see if ‘railway worker’ or ‘navvy’ is listed. Once confirmed, look under Stories at the Railway Archive, or search for ‘navvy’ at the Railway Museum website to learn more about them. If you want to delve even deeper into your ancestors’ lives on the railway, you’ll find a massive list of useful websites and resources at Genguide ( www.snipca.com/32930).