A huge THANK YOU to everyone involved in 2019’s Transcription Tuesday!
This brilliant initiative was hosted by Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, and involved the generosity of transcribers from across the world. On 5 February 2019 around 60 transcribers tackled a volume produced by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) trade union (now the RMT). It detailed around 2,000 legal cases between 1901 and 1905 in which the union defended its members – 1,000 of which involved accidents.
The Transcription Tuesday transcribers were so dedicated that they polished this volume off during the day, and moved on to another set of records, produced in 1908: fantastic!
We’ve now made the legal volume available (see here), and are working on tidying up the additional 1908 data that was also transcribed. There’s more about the initial data release here.
Read more about Transcription Tuesday in this blog post, or some of the cases found in the ASRS volume in these blog posts:
This page originally featured the information below:
We’re delighted to be working with Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine as part of this year’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ event.
More importantly, we’re looking forward to working with you on this! This is your chance to get involved in our project and to help researchers world-wide find out more about railway work in the early 20th century.
We’re transcribing a volume of accident records from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants trade union, dating from 1901-1905 and held by one of our project partners, the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick.
Courtesy MRC.
We’ve scanned the volume; we’re asking you to extract the information from the images and enter it into an online spreadsheet. Full details are found in the handbook – please download it here and check it carefully as it’s full of important and useful information.
We think each case should take a few minutes to transcribe; there are around 18 cases per page, and 119 pages in total, so around 2150 cases altogether. It’s a big effort, but we really hope we can finish the volume on Transcription Tuesday – it’ll be a great boost to our project and really help make more information available to all the researchers using our resources!
Thanks in advance for all your help with this – we can’t wait to get this data transcribed and available!
Do have a look at everything else our project offers, too – from the existing database (here) covering around 4,500 British and Irish railway workers, to the weekly blog (here) and more besides, we hope it’s of use and interest to you.
Mike, Helen and Karen
‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project leads