Jonathan Scott explains the wide range of digital resources available for seafaring relations
There are reasons to be cheerful if you’re researching a member of the family who served in the Merchant Navy. According to the Crew List Index Project (CLIP; see page 36), “British seafarers of the late 19th and early 20th century are the best documented workers that there have ever been.”
Crew lists, or ‘crew agreements’, formed a contract between a seafarer and employer. They were drawn up for any kind of vessel, from “small fishing boats and sailing barges, often crewed by father and son, to the largest passenger liners with whole departments of deck officers, seamen, engineering and victualling staff amounting to as many as 400 individuals”, explains our top pick (see right).
We’ve selected some of the most useful sites here, but there are many more to find. CLIP has a links page (crewlist.org.uk/data/external) with a host of resources, often relating to specific periods, countries, industries, ports or fishing communities. Second on its list is British Southern Whale Fishery (britishwhaling. org), which has a database of whaling voyages and crew covering 1775–1861.
1915 CREW LISTS
w 1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk Here you can search a database of British Merchant Navy crew lists from 1915. This was a volunteer-led collaboration between The National Archives (TNA) in Kew and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, launched in 2012, with input from the CLIP team. The database contains more than 39,000 crew lists from the year 1915, featuring about 750,000 names, which you can narrow by various fields (or opt to search by the name of vessel). You may well find names appearing more than once – masters of vessels that stayed close to home or the Continent would submit half-yearly agreements, containing details of crews employed on different voyages, while ‘foreign trade’ vessels tended to make much longer voyages, needing only one crew list.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
w tinyurl.com/TNA-guide-merchantnavy-records There are several TNA guides to help you take the plunge into maritime research, from this one covering merchant crew lists, musters and log books, to abbreviations found in Merchant Navy records, to campaign medals and Second World War movement cards. Guides will often point you to sources available through external websites, or material you can search via TNA’s online catalogue Discovery, such as r
