drownings in the thames

[kenith]

Are there records that show people that died due to drowning in the thames, e.g river police? My man supposedly died in the late 1800s and short of checking all the London newspapers from that time I do not know what to look at------- any ideas?

[Valda]

Is his name very common and you are having difficulty locating his death certificate, otherwise the certificate itself will give you his cause of death, the place and the date. If he drowned in the Thames his death would be subject to an inquest which might have been reported in a local London newspaper - local to where he drowned.

Regards

Valda

[behindthefrogs]

Do you know if the drowning was above or below Teddington Lock?

[mc8]

Is his name very common and you are having difficulty locating his death certificate, otherwise the certificate itself will give you his cause of death, the place and the date. If he drowned in the Thames his death would be subject to an inquest which might have been reported in a local London newspaper - local to where he drowned.

Regards

Valda

it would probably only be reported if it was something spectacular, and few records remain of inquests. There is at least one corpse a week recovered from the Thames today, and its nothing new. The St Georges canal alone had at least one drowning per week in the 1880s-if you can find a record, you will be lucky

[Darian Zam]

I am looking for someone named Mary who apparently drowned accidentally in the Thames holidaying with her husband. This would be some time after 1892, I think. What other sources may there be besides newspapers of the time and what's the best database of British newspapers?

[maddys52]

This thread is from 2007, maybe you should consider starting a new thread asking for help for information about Mary, or ask a moderator to do this?

How do you know she drowned in the Thames, is it from the death certificate? Although you don't seem to have the actual date? Perhaps looking for her death might be a first start.

Newspapers would be a good place for more detail, there are a few subscription sites eg british newspaper achive (BNA), findmypast, newpapers.com. I use my Australian National Library card to access Gale Primary Sources which includes British Library Newspapers free from home - other libraries around the globe have similar access.

What is her name? Happy to do a look up in papers I have access to.

[Darian Zam]

Ah, wonderful. Thanks for your response. I don't think restarting a thread is necessary. Was just hoping for someone who had combed through these drowning instances previously.
Yes I was on to BNA, and have looked at some potential articles I can see for free but nothing matches yet. Is there a global  library edition of BNA like Ancestry for public libraries you can access for free as a member,  or is it only available for users  in Britain?
Her name was originally Mary Hodgman Tyree, b 1872 Queenstown, New Zealand. She was known as Polly Tyree. Although we have zero evidence her name was Mary Ann, as we know 'Polly' was a standard replacement for that.
I have worked with other relatives in the past to try find what happened to her. None of us have been able to crack it with all our combined research work and experience, She's a real mystery case who last appears in family portraits taken 1892. Then she completely vanishes.
I have now been working with a younger descendant who has been responsible for sorting through a recently departed grandmother's possessions including her old family history research and has become interested in his ancestry. He is now also fascinated by the mystery or what happened to Mary and why she cannot be found.
Although we have actually uncovered a little more new information such as school records and pinpointed the date to being 1893 she was probably last living with her family, we have made no real headway in months.
Until today, when he found a hand drawn part of a tree with Mary in it, from another relative, with a note on her name saying she drowned in the Thames with her husband on a visit to London. So we know that she likely married and her name changed, a foregone conclusion since she effectively 'disappeared'. This still doesn't help to find a marriage record which just doesn't seem to exist in NZ, most AU states, or UK.
This should give us more to work with but it doesn't as we have never found a single further piece of information on her and this new info doesn't yet connect with anything obvious.

This was a previous thread some time ago here, in which we made no real headway but it gives you the background:

https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=888912.0

[oldfashionedgirl]

Have you looked at ship passenger lists of her coming to England. You would get her and husbands name.

[jaywit]

Have you any idea of her date of birth?

If it came to searching through Mary Ann's deaths in 1893 an age would help, do you also mean her husband drowned as well?

Also you would have to consider that her identity was not known and her death could be recorded as unknown woman.