Website Wednesday - Railway Work, Life & Death

The Railway Work, Life & Death Project is a joint initiative between the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum (NRM) and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MRC). The project also works with other institutions including The National Archives of the UK (TNA) and the RMT Union.

The project makes it easier to find out about workers and work on Britain and Ireland’s railways from 1855 to 1939. They provide data about what staff were doing on the railways, what happened to them and why, all revealed through the accidents they had. Working on the railways 100 or more years ago was incredibly dangerous, with hundreds killed and tens of thousands injured each year.

The Railway Work, Life & Death project has been able to make publicly available the work produced by the NRM, MRC and TNA volunteers. Between them, they’ve produced a database of over 115,000 individuals and incidents. The volunteers have extracted the details found in the records of accidents produced between 1855 and 1939 – things like names, ages, roles, companies and details of the accident or support provided – and entered them into the free database.

Week 20 (May 14-20) At the Cemetery - #52Ancestors

The information to be found on tombstones and in cemeteries cannot be discounted.  From visiting cemeteries in person to finding online cemetery records to uncovering photos of headstones, I have had some wonderful finds.  The information found on headstones can be remarkably varied in content, with anything from a simple name to the details of parents, spouse, children and dates and places of birth and death.  Sometimes finding one relative in a cemetery leads to the discovery of several more, with whole generations of family all buried in the same location. 

The photograph above is the Mulholland family plot in Eurobin, Victoria.  The plot includes two main headstones and several plaques.

The main headstone is for my great great grandfather David Mulholland who died 10 April 1902, age 71 and his wife Eliza Jane who died 30 October 1925, age 95.  Also included on the headstone are three infant children - Samuel Thomas, died 28 April 1879, age 3 months ; Margaret died 5 September 1885 age 10 years, and an unnamed infant son who died 26 January 1887 age 10 days.

The second, smaller headstone is 'erected to the memory of the beloved children of David and Jane Mulholland who died at Boggy Creek.'

Sadly, the three children named on the headstone all died as infants within a few weeks of each other - Henry Mulholland, died 29 January 1872 aged 4 years 8 months, Margaret Jane Mulholland who died 2 February 1872 aged 6 years 4 months and Thomas Mulholland who died 14 February 1872 aged 1 year 2 months.  A stark reminder of the perils of childhood and how disease could carry off several family members in rapid succession - all three died of diphtheria.

Family Tree US May/June 2026

The latest issue of Family Tree US magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines. 

Inside this month's issue : 

• Remembering What Matters Most 
• RootsTech 2026 Roundup
• Scribe AI : transcribing and translating records
• New partners for FamilySearch 
• Digitizing memories with Ancestry 
• Family Tree DNA: Enhanced Tests
• Getting Smart with AI
• Soul Searching
• The Course of Human Events 
• Four Score and 170 Years Ago
• Find Your U.S. Ancestors
• Loyal Royal subjects
• At Your Service - the lives of indentured servants
• 75 Best Websites for US genealogy research.
• Hair Apparent • A woman and her hair-filled brooch present a 19th-century dilemma
• Confirming Relationships
• Searching Newspaper Databases at Elephind
• And more... 

Family Tree UK June 2026

The latest issue of Family Tree UK magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• 1 million entries in Scotland’s Criminal Database
• Is this really my ancestor?
• Preserving your family story for future generations.
• Walking a fine line Ethical dilemmas in genealogy
• Parish Treasures
• The case of the missing ancestor 
• A Genealogist’s Statistical Guide to the Irish 1926 Census
• Jessie Blackshaw - Beginnings in a Working County
• Booth’s Poverty Maps and the Stepney Union Casebooks 
• Spotlight on Devon Family History Society
• Dear Paul 
• Using shared DNA matches
• And more... 

Week 19 (May 7-13) A Question the Records Can't Answer - #52Ancestors

While the records we find are vital to our family history research, there are many questions that the records cannot answer.

The records cannot tell us why our ancestors make many of the choices they made.  Why did they choose a particular profession?  Why did they marry their partners?  How did they choose the names of their children?  Why did they move, divorce, change their name, enlist in the armed forces.
Several of my ancestors made to momentous decision to emigrate to Australia.  While the records can tell us when they emigrated, and history might provide some hints as to why, the records cannot fill in the whole picture.

My great grandfather, James Nicholas Clark, was born in Bristol, England or possibly Launceston, Tasmania around 1856, just as the family emigrated to Australia.  James’s younger sister Annie Amelia Clark was born 31 March 1857 in Port Sorrell, Tasmania, where the family lived for at least 12 years before they crossed Bass Strait and settled in Victoria.  Why did they leave England and move to the other side of the world?

Then there is my German branch of the family tree.  Carl Friedrich Beseler, known in Australia as Frederick, was born around 1810 in Hanover, Germany.  He was a shoemaker in Germany and a farmer in Australia, arriving in Adelaide on 1 April 1848 on the ship Pauline from Bremen, Germany.  Passengers listed were Frederick Beseler, Shoemaker, Mrs Beseler and 5 children.  The family lived in South Australia for 7 years before travelling overland to Victoria, where they settled near Ercildown.  Several members of the family are buried in Learmonth Cemetery.  Why did they leave Germany for a country where they didn't even speak the language?

I would love to know what prompted these families, with young children in tow, to pack up and move halfway around the world, settle in one state of Australia, then pack up and move again several years later. For whatever their reasons, my original Australian immigrant ancestors made a huge leap of faith to leave their homelands and travel to a distant country, most with little chance of returning to their homeland if their new lives proved less than they hoped.  And the records can't answer why.

Who Do You Think You Are May 2026

The latest issue of Who Do You Think You Are magazine is now available free online for Campaspe Library members via our subscription to Libby eMagazines.

Inside this month's issue : 

• Who Do You Think You Are? 2026 celebrities announced
• Ancestry adds Shropshire electoral records
• TheGenealogist adds 77,000 Worcestershire parish records
• UK and Ireland in €5m archives boost
• New collection of 12 million soldiers’ records goes online
• A fun-loving Puritan 
• Make the most of the 1926 census of Ireland
• Understanding the value of historic wages 
• Labour economics during the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral 
• ‘Dad spent years in a TB Hospital 
• Apprenticeship Records 
• Thomas Coram 1668-1751 
• Parish Indenture, 1713
• Go Further - Nine more websites you can't afford to miss
• WW2 Royal Navy Casualty Logs 
• And more... 

Irish Lives Remembered Magazine

The latest issue of the free online magazine Irish Lives Remembered is now available.

Articles in this issue include : 

Declan Byrne – Remembering William Deans and the History of the Dublin Docks

Fiona Fitzsimons – Taylor-Made: The Swift Family‘s Irish Immigrant Love Story

Brigit McCone – Lover: Letters from the Scandalous 19th-century Irish Diaspora

David Caron – Dublin’s Stained Glass: Highlights by Harry Clarke

Katharine Simms – Saints and Scholars: the Magrath Clan and other Erenagh Hereditary Church Families

Eamonn P. Kelly – Domhnach Mám Éan, the Connemara Harvest Festival

Donna Rutherford – Genealog-AI: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Family History