Registers 1835 to 1844

The first attempt to create a register of British seafarers began in 1835 with the Register of Seamen, Series I (at TNA in BT 120) which consists of five volumes listing the seafarers alphabetically, with details of their voyage written in columns against their entry. Identifying the ship involved should be straightforward.

From 1835 to 1844, the Registers of Seamen, Series II (BT 112) are more complicated. They are divided into sections for Home Trade and Foreign Trade so entries for one person could be in either or both sections. Some entries appear to include both Home and Foreign trade entries.

The register entries have a code for the capacity in which the seafarer was employed. Numbers for the port and ship are on the next line, in the format port number/port rotation number.

Interpreting the port number is straightforward - see the list here Port numbers . However, the port number could refer to the port at which the voyage ended, rather than the ship's port of registry. This may cause problems in finding crew documents if the two are not the same.

The port rotation number identifies the ship within that port. Fortunately, the ship's name is usually shown as the last entry of the record, so there is no need to attempt to decipher these numbers.

There is no known key for the numbers for the 1835-1844 registers. The first run of numbers for a port do appear to run in approximately alphabetical order of the ships' names and to persist from one year to the next. However, there are also other much larger numbers. These numbers appear to increase steadily, in sequence with the date the voyage ended. They may simply be a serial identifier used for all the crew lists for that port - derived from the systems used to keep track of the order (or rotation) in which ships were handled at the port. These numbers are not likely to be of use in identifying the ship, but will be written on the corresponding crew list when it is found, thus confirming the match.

Home Trade

The entries for home trade voyages were compiled from the half-yearly returns which were made by the masters of ships using the List D form.

In between the ship identifiers, there is the half-year that the list covered, so either June or December and the year.

 

Foreign Trade

The entries for foreign-going voyages were compiled from the List C forms which were handed in by the master when the crew were paid off at the end of each voyage.

The register entries are similar to those for the home trade except that the date shown is the date that the voyage ended. The format may be m/y (especially pre-1838) or d/m/y. There may be several entries for one year, each corresponding to one voyage. Note that the port may be the port at which the voyage ended, not the ship's port of registry. The port of arrival can be checked by looking up the shipping news in newspapers of the time.

  Registers 1845 to 1854

For the period 1845 to 1854, seamen were required to have a Register Ticket. The resulting records of hundreds of thousand of seamen are in the Register of Seamen's Tickets held at TNA in BT 113 (and indexed in BT 114).

The registers and the crew lists they were compiled from used codes for ships that were based on a new sequence of port rotation numbers that were completely different from the ones used previously. Full details of how this sequence worked and how the port rotation numbers can be decoded are here Port rotation numbers 1845 to 1854

The codes to identify the ship and her port use the format: 'Port rotation number'.'Port number', so for example the code 86.104 is a ship with port rotation number 86 from port number 104. 104 is easy - that's Whitby. The port rotation number can also be decoded using the index on this site and turns out to be the CONCORD, registered at Whitby, 6/1837 of 189 tons.

In BT 113, the section for voyages has columns for each year which are divided into two - 'Out' and 'Home'. BT 113 covers both Home trade and Foreign-going voyages and the entries are made in different ways, as follows:

Home trade voyages

The home trade entries were compiled from the crew lists, List D, which were half-yearly returns listing all the crew employed during that half-year. The voyage details shown on List D forms vary from terse ('Coasting') to a list of dozens of short voyages with full dates. The clerks at the board of trade dealt with that simply. The record for a list D return would span the two sub-columns and have the ship and port codes as above, followed by either 6 or 12 and the year as yy. So for example,

This shows a half-yearly return for the second half-year (ending December) of 1851 for the ship CONCORD of Whitby.

Since a seafarer might work on several different ships in a year, there may be several home-trade entries for that year, not necessarily in chronological order, and perhaps with foreign-going voyages mixed in.

Foreign-going voyages

Foreign-going voyages have two entries - one in the 'Out' column and one in the 'Home' column. This still applies if the voyage spanned two or more years - the return voyage is in the 'Home' column for the year the voyage ended.

The ship is identified using the ship and port format, but with the addition of a further digit. The extra digit may be the number of the voyage for that year, but is of no practical use and can be ignored.

The voyage details show the port of departure or arrival, again using the port number for that port, followed by the day and month. Of course, that port will not necessarily be the same as the ship's port of registration. The year is the year at the top of the column. So, for example, in the 'Out' column for the year 1853 we might find

This entry shows the same ship, CONCORD of Whitby, sailing from Woodbridge (port number 107) on 17 September 1853.

The entries against each voyage show the capacity in which the seafarer was engaged - 'S' for seaman, 'App' for apprentice, etc. If that entry is not clear, the capacity may be clearer on the corresponding crew list when that is found.

  Registers 1855 and 1856

In 1855 a major change was made to the way in which British registered ships were identified. Starting on 15 April 1855, every British ship was allocated an unique number, her official number which remained with the ship throughout her life and was entered in the registers of shipping and on crew lists and seafarers registers. For more details of official numbers, see Official numbers

The ship's official number was not initially used on the crew lists and registers of seafarers in 1855. Perhaps because of the transition, fewer entries than normal were made in the registers for that year.

For the first half-year of 1855 ships in the home trade and for the whole of 1855 for foreign-going ships, a code was written on the crew documents and entered in the registers, which looks like the port rotation number described above, but is not the same. No exact sequence for these has been found so far. They appear to be related to the registers of shipping in a similar way as the previous port rotation numbers but form a new series. They might be linked to the annual shipping returns from each port and may be in a sequence of the ships extant in early 1855.

Beware! Using these 1855 temporary codes with the CLIP port rotation number index for the main pre-1855 port rotation numbers will produce erroneous results.

For the rest of 1855 and for 1856, the ships official number was written on the crew lists and so could have been used in the registers but, in practice, the ship's name and port number were often used.

  Registers 1857 onwards

The records from 1857 onwards use the ship's official number to identify it. The ship's name is also usually shown but, if not, it can be found from the CLIP vessel official number search Ship by official number

The Masters' and Mates' records of service in BT 124 cover the period from 1857 into the 1860s and beyond. We have a full guide to how to use them, here BT 124 records of masters and mates

From 1857 to 1860, the crew lists are held at TNA in BT 98. Images of them are available on FamilySearch and can be viewed from anywhere, not just at FamilySearch centres and affiliate libraries. Links to them are available by entering the official number on the CLIP search page Crew lists by official number which also shows the location of crew lists post-1860.