Recovered payroll and recovery records · Courrières Basin · 1906
On 10 March 1906, a series of explosions tore through the Courrières mining network in northern France. The disaster spread rapidly through connected galleries, collapsing workings, cutting off men underground, and leaving rescue parties to work through smoke, heat, gas, and unstable passages.
More than a thousand miners were lost. In the days that followed, official lists were revised repeatedly as bodies were recovered, survivors emerged, and fragmentary company records were compared against witness accounts, payroll entries, and pithead reports.
This reconstructed register gathers a small group of surviving photographic payroll cards and later recovery notes. Some entries remain inconsistent. Names, pit sections, occupations, and final outcomes do not always agree cleanly across the surviving copies.
The register is incomplete. Some records are duplicated, amended, or derived from later archive transcriptions.