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95/513 Railway Ancestors: A Guide to the Staff Records of the Railway Companies of England and Wales 1822-1947
David T Hawkings
Alan Sutton/Public Record Office, Stroud/London, 1995, xviii, 509 pp., ISBN 0-7509-0883-1, L25
Puzzled as to why he should be favoured with this particular book, your correspondent, for two reasons, approached it with a degree of caution. First, although the art and craft of family history is akin in many respects to the compilation of bibliographies, which your reviewer has indulged in on a number of occasions, the penalty for success in family history is that you double your lines of enquiry at each level of research and there's no rhyme or reason in that. Second, your reviewer is no railway enthusiast. However, he does flatter himself on being able to recognize a good reference work when he sees one. And make no mistake, this is a very good reference work. just as there were a myriad railway companies in England and Wales, constantly merging into bigger companies, and finally coalescing into the "Big Four" in 1923, which, in turn, were nationalized as British Railways in 1947, so their archives presented a huge, unorganized, and daunting source of prime material to any would-be researchers to investigate no matter what their specific field of interest was. In this pioneering work,...