If you know the ship's official number, the quickest way is to use the CLIP search page - you can enter the official number and the results will show a list of where the documents for the ship are held, with links to archive sites where possible.
Crew lists by official number
If you only know the ship's name, use the CLIP search pages or the Mercantile Navy List to find possible official numbers for the ship.
Ships by name
Advanced search
Mercantile Navy List
Once you have found the ship, the CLIP search pages will link you directly to the archive holdings for the ship.
If you don't know the ship's name, it is more complicated; read more on this page.
The links on this page give full details of the available sources and the search pages all have a notes section to explain how to use them.
To trace a crew list which records a seafarer, you will need to know, or find out:
- the name of the ship that they sailed on;
- the ship's official number;
- the year(s) that the seafarer served on that ship;
- which archives hold the crew lists for that ship and those years.
It may also be helpful to know the ship's port of registry.
DON'T PANIC (YET)! This page explains how to find any information that you don't have, and what terms like 'official number' mean.
Do you know the ship's name?
If the answer is no, then PANIC (A LITTLE).
You will need to try searching the indexes which list seafarer's names.
Then come back to this point.
If you do know the ship's name, the next task is to find her official number. This is important, because most of the large repositories
which hold crew lists use official numbers, rather than names, as a reference.
Shipping Registers, Official Numbers and Appropriation Books
Details of all British merchant ships are entered into Shipping Registers at a local Port of Registry. From 1855, British ships were given an
unique Official Number when they were first
registered. The number stayed with the ship throughout her life, even
if she was re-registered or the ship’s name was changed.
The official numbers were allocated by the Registrar General of Shipping. Each port of registry
in the United Kingdom and British colonies was allocated runs of numbers as necessary. At these ports, the
numbers were recorded in the shipping registers and also in an Appropriation Book for that port.
Copies of registers were sent to the Registrar General of Shipping who maintained the central Appropriation Books,
which are the single complete definitive list of British registered vessels and their official numbers.
These central Appropriation Books are held at the current Registry of Shipping and Seamen (RSS) at Cardiff.
CLIP has made images of the six volumes and data from them forms the basis of the CLIP name/official number index.
For more detail on the records of British ships, please see our information page
The simplest way is to use the CLIP finding aids.
Enter the ship's name, or a part of it, into
the CLIP search page and it will provide you with a list of the ships whose name matches, with their official number.
The advanced search allows you to input a range of dates and port of registry.
For each ship, the results page will provide you with links to our data on holdings of crew lists, and to the Maritime History Archive (MHA) list.
The search pages use the CLIP vessel database which has data from the Appropriation Books and other records gathered during the CLIP project. It currently contains over 770,000 records of ships' names and official numbers. It is the only database with complete coverage of British registered ships of the period, with all official numbers from 1 to 200,000 and covering 1855 to the 1950s.
If you know the ship's name and official number, the next step is to track down the
crew lists for that ship. The lists are scattered and we provide more detail below, but the most direct way is to use our finding aid:
Alternatively, you could use MHA's Crew List Index - see below.
Where are crew lists held?
The lists are held at many different places - nearly 50 archives around the world have holdings.
As the diagram shows, TNA took a 10% random sample, then NMM took the remainder of 1861 and 1862 and years ending in '5'. Local archives were offered the records for
their ports and what remained was shipped to MHA in Canada. As a result:
The records for one ship could be at any or all of these places.
Crew lists at local archives
10% of the lists are in over forty local archives or record offices (ROs) in the UK
and at the National Archives of the Republic of Ireland. Holdings at archives vary from sparse
samples to almost complete runs for individual ships.
The archives holdings are, in general, only for ships registered at ports local to the archive, not the ships that sailed from the port. There may also be documents relating to ships
registered at other ports, for example if the registry of a ship was transferred.
You can use CLIP data to look for holdings of crew lists, by archive or by port.
The data for archives and ports also shows holdings of shipping registers.
You can also use MHA's Crew List Index (see below), though not all local archive holdings are included.
Which local archives hold crew lists?
All the archives for coastal counties of England and Wales, except Norfolk, have at
least a sample of the lists for the ports in their area. The Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man have most of their lists.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately, because they would have been destroyed otherwise) the crew lists for London, all
Scottish ports and the remaining lists for other ports are at the Maritime History Archive - see below.
Only a small number of crew lists for 'colonial' ports are to be found in the collections at TNA and NMM. Crew lists for
Newfoundland ports are at the Maritime History Archive and some Australian archives have documents.
Crew lists at the National Maritime Museum
The lists and agreements for 1861, 1862 and for the years ending in “5”
are at the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in
Greenwich. 1985 and 1995 are out-stored. You will need to register with their incomprehensible online ordering system to order documents for a visit or to order copies. All we can say is 'Good luck'.
Though they are slowly working on it, forty years after they took the documents, the self-styled "most extensive library of maritime history in the world" still does not have a catalogue of their crew list holdings.
Crew lists at The National Archives
A random 10% sample of the documents is held at The National Archives (TNA) in Kew,
in BT 99 with others in BT 100, BT 144 and BT 165.
BT 99 is indexed by official number, originally in loose-leaf
files at TNA. There is no index by ship’s name.
In collaboration with TNA, CLIP has transferred this paper index to
electronic format. If you know the ship's official number, the index is now available at TNA.
The data is also part of the larger CLIP crew list index, so it's much easier to use this link, which will also show holdings elsewhere for that ship.
BT 100 holds the documents for famous ships, such as the Great Eastern, Terra Nova and the Lusitania.
BT 144 holds a 10% sample of the records for fishing vessels under 80 tons, starting at 1884.
BT 165 holds samples of the official log books, extracted from the main runs of documents for the period 1902 to 1919.
Crew lists at the Maritime History Archive
The remaining 70%+ of lists are at the Maritime History Archive (MHA)
in St John’s, Newfoundland, who took in these documents when they were threatened with destruction in the 1970s.
You can search their index on-line on the MHA web site (again by official number only) and order copies
of crew lists.
Their index also shows holdings of crew lists at most local archives in Britain.
The MHA data is also included in the CLIP crew list index, so it may be easier to use that as it will also show holdings elsewhere for that ship.
The MHA NL Crews Database contains over 30,000 entries taken from
the crew lists of Newfoundland and Labrador registered vessels for 1915 to 1942. You can search the index on-line and view the images.
MHA are also gradually digitising their holdings of crew lists for 1881.
They are well over half way through with 376,500 entries. As with the NL Crews Database, you can search the index on-line and view the images.
This is a significant and welcome development. The image quality
is excellent and the system provides a first glimpse of what could be available in the future.
The CLIP index of crew list holdings for the period 1861 to 1913 contains over 1 million entries, and covers between 80% and 90% of the documents which survive.
There are several reasons why you may not be able to find the crew lists for a particular ship for a particular year:
-
The ship may have been laid up, sold to foreigners, requisitioned by the Admiralty or the War Department, or have sunk taking the ships articles with her.
- The document may not have been preserved. It appears that the records which reached the Board of Trade in London are only for ships registered at
ports in the British Isles. Some records for ships registered at colonial ports have survived in national archives, but these are not included in our index.
-
The documents may have ended in the wrong archive - many archives have a small bundle of stray crew lists which really belong elsewhere.
-
The archive has not catalogued their holdings. The National Maritime Museum has 10% of all documents for this period, but has not felt
the need to catalogue them. West Glamorgan, Pembrokeshire and Suffolk archives have no online catalogue.
-
The documents have been mis-catalogued or mis-filed at the archive. The documents are hand-written and archivists are human, so errors both in name and official number are not uncommon.
-
The archives catalogue is not clear. For example, some archives use a range of years, such as 1882-99, and it is not clear
whether they mean all the years in that range. In this example, the years 1885 and 1895 should be at NMM, not the archives.
-
CLIP has made an error in transferring data. We, too, are human. It would be surprising if we had not made a few mistakes.
In many cases, it will be clear which port(s) the ship was registered at. An email to the local archives for that port would be a
good place to start in looking for a missing list.
The National Archives have a large number of online information pages about the documents they hold. The ones which cover the records of merchant seafarers are here:
For more detail and for other periods, records of ships, Royal Naval
Reserve etc, the best reference book is:
Records of Merchant Shipping and Seamen, Smith, Watts and Watts,
PRO, (ISBN: 1 873 162 49 9).
Crew lists, 1861 to 1913 
Previous page 
In brief - how to search for crew lists for a ship
Maritime History Archive Crew List Index