Coal Mining & Pit Disasters

[Bob Spiers]

After a quite long search to try to discover if a Coal Mining ancestor had died (in his 40's) because of his involvement in a Mining Accident/Disaster I came across a most interesting Site 'The Coalmining History Resource Centre'. As well as covering the subject I needed to research -accidents/disasters - it offers a wealth of other information all relating to Coalmining in the 18th Century onwards. You will find it here Coalmining.

My own research is still on-going, but if any site will yield the information I seek, it is this one. Its Database: 'National Database of Mining Deaths in Great Britain from 1700' (containing 164,000 records) is simply quite mind boggling, not to mention very, very sad. You can search (CTL+F) by various criteria: ancestor names; year periods, location areas or, if known, the name of the Pit itself. Or just scroll down until you come across the period in question and seek out the Pit areas of interest.

If still lacking details then I suggest you 'Google' the name of the Pit and year of the Accident/Disaster (as I am doing) -or check Newspapers archives online (perhaps FMP) to uncover even more details.

 

[Susan]

As some of you may be aware, the site Bob gave no longer exists.
A bit of detective work on Google found the reason. The site was owned by the solicitors' firm Raleys and they went into administration in March 2016.

However, part of the site is still available on Wayback Machine. The pdf files listing reports of disasters are there but unfortunately the search function for individuals is not. Just copy and paste Bob's link into Wayback Machine's search box.

 

[At home in NZ]

I was going to start a new discussion with the title of
'Collier and what I dug up – pun intended' then found this one and thought I should add to it instead.

While researching a particular male in one of my trees I noticed the occupation of Collier in his 1907 marriage certificate. Both fathers occupations were also Collier.
My particular male enlisted for WW1 and in his army record it states that he remained in the Reserves due to being required to work at the Hulton Colliery.
To make sure I had the right spelling for the Colliery I looked it up in Google and found there had been a disaster at the Colliery in the Pretoria Pit on 21 Dec 1910. Further into the army record I found a list of his children. There was a son called Pretoria whose birth date was 21 Dec 1910.

It was obvious that the my particular male was not one of the 344 men and boys who were killed in the disaster because there were further children in the list.

 

[Susan]

The original website with the pdf's of mining disasters can be accessed again. Most of the disasters in the documents list the casualties.
Mining disasters

Unfortunately, the person still search doesn't work so those who died or were injured in single accidents can't be found, such as my 3 x great grandfather who died in 1857 when he tripped and fell down the mine shaft. Ancestry still has these in its database - which used to link to Raleys site - but the information is not always exactly the same. For example where a man was involved in an accident and died later of his injuries, Ancestry often gives the date of the accident as the date of death.