Owners

The primary source for the owners of ships are the official shipping registers, but information can also be found in various published registers of ships and the crew lists

Shipping registers

The ownership of British registered vessels was recorded under the provisions of the Act for the Further Increase and Encouragement of Shipping and Navigation, 1786 (26 Geo 3 c 60) Act which introduced the compulsory registration of all ships over 15 tons with a deck. The Act also established the post of Registrar General of Shipping under the Board of Customs.

Under the Act for the registering of Vessels, 1823 (4 Geo 4 c 41) Act ownership was divided into 64 shares and the measurement of tonnage was specified.

For more details of shipping registers, see Registration of shipping

While the registers are the primary source for records of owners, they are not easy to access. Few have been digitised and even fewer have been indexed. We describe how to track them down here: Finding registers

On initial registration, some or all of the owners subscribed to an oath before the registrar of shipping, attesting to the building and details of the ship, and their ownership. These owners were referred to as the subscribing owners. The new form of register introduced in the 1850s did not make this distinction. An example of the registration of owners is shown in Figure 1.

In the 19th century, especially for smaller ships, many of the owners would own just two or four shares. These owners often had little direct connection with the sea and included local shopkeepers, clergymen and even small farmers and quarrymen. The builders and masters of the ships often held more substantial shares, giving them a personal interest in the success and survival of the ship.

Shares could be bought and sold, mortgaged, and bequeathed. These transactions were recorded in the shipping register entry, with additionial transactions for a ship on a separate page at the end of the volume or in a separate Transactions register.

Under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894 (57 & 58 Vict c 60) Act a managing owner had to be registered. Managing owners had been designated and shown in registers of shipping since before 1870 and were marked with X in the Mercantile Navy List (MNL) from 1889.

From early times, shipping companies often owned many ships. This is our list of web sites dealing with shipping companies Shipping companies

Ships might also be owned by a company set up to manage just that ship - a single ship company. For example, the Ahdeek (ON 84999) is shown in the Mercantile Navy List (MNL) for 1892 as being owned by The Steamship "Ahdeek" Shares Co. Ltd. of Glasgow.

The ownership of fishing boats was recorded in the registers of fishing vessels at the ports of registry, though the entries may just name one person 'and others'.

Registers of ships

Registers of ships often show the owners, such as the Mercantile Navy List (MNL), Lloyd's Register of Ships and, for fishing boats, Olsen's Fisherman's Nautical Almanack. Images of these sources are readily available online, though there are no indexes of the owners of the ships.

The CLIP images of MNL are mostly .jpg, so not searchable, but the images of the many editions of MNL on the Digital Archives Initiative (DAI) site are .pdfs which can be searched, here, Search MNL on the DAI site   Enter the text to search for in the search box, top-right. This will search all the editions of MNL which they have. Use the Filter tab to produce a convenient list of hits from which you can view the images.

The Lloyd's Register Foundation has links to most editions of Lloyd's Register of Ships online, which are hosted by the Internet Archive and others. The images are searchable, though only one year at a time. For Internet Archive images, use the search entry control, top left, enter the text to search for, and then Enter.
The hits are shown below the search entry and as marks on the image ribbon at the bottom of the page. Lloyd's Register is here: Lloyd's Register online

Images of Olsen's Almanack are available on this site. The almanack shows owners but is not indexed by owner. See Olsen's Fisherman's Nautical Almanack

Other registers of ships are listed here. Again, some of them show owners, but with no index to the owners. Where the images are .pdfs, they should be searchable as described above. Other registers of ships

Crew lists

Apart from the early documents, most crew lists show the owner of the ship. However, no general indexes are available.

The CLIP transcriptions from crew lists included a record of the owner as shown on the document and an index of them is here. Owners named on crew lists   Please be aware - though there are 60,000 entries in this data, this is only a small sample of the millions of documents.

  Shipbuilders

Shipbuilders can mean anything from huge companies such as Harland and Wolff to a few men on a beach making a small fishing vessel every few years.

For large companies, plenty of information is available online and this is a list of external sites which give details of shipbuilders: Ship building

For smaller shipbuilders, one possible source of information is the shipping registers for the nearest port of registry. However, the ship may have been built somewhere far from her port of registry. Also the details of a ship's builders in the registers is often terse. For example, Figure 2 shows a ship registered in the Isle of Man, which was built in Fleetwood, Lancashire - the builder's name is not shown.

Primary sources include Yard Books which list the ships which were laid down. If they have survived, they are likely to be held at the archives adjacent to the shipyard. This is our list of archives with maritime holdings Archives

Newspapers frequently recorded the launching of ships (and the celebrations that went with them). Our list of newspapers is here Newspapers

  Places

To find the details of ships, owners and builders relating to a particular place, several of the methods described above can be used:

• Text searches of .pdf images of MNL and Lloyd's Register;
• Newspaper searches;
• Searches or enquiries at local archives and reference libraries for records and books;
• Online search engines will often dig out obscure books and other material.