This page provides details of the documents held at archives, split into Crew lists and Shipping registers. We have not attempted to list other maritime-related documents which an archive may hold.

For background details of these documents, please see: Crew lists Registration of shipping

How to search for documents by archive

Select the first letter of the archive name from the alphabetic list and then the name of the archive.

Reading and using the results

The results are displayed in two sections: Crew lists and Shipping registers.

Where possible, we link to the archive catalogue or The National Archive (TNA) catalogue.

Beware. Several archives have catalogues driven by software called DServe, or the ironically named CalmView, which is best described as 'user hostile'. It needs considerable patience to use, is often slow, or just locks up. Worse, the links often change as the archives try to make it work.

If all else fails, where neither CLIP nor the archive catalogue provide data, the archive name at the top of the page gives a link to their web site.

Crew lists

For crew lists, we list the ports for which the archive holds documents, and the years covered.

Where we have further details of the holdings for a port, we provide a link Details which provides a list of ships for that port.

The lists of ships are in alphabetic order sorted by ships name and show the ship's official number. Use the alphabet list at the top of the results to select by initial letter.

In many cases, the archive will hold documents for several local ports and occasionally stray documents for other ports. To obtain a complete list of all the documents held by the archive use the link Details for all ports at the top-right of the table.

However,the known holdings for individual ships in all archives can be tracked down. Against the name of each ship are two links: The MHA link shows their index page for that official number, which includes details of the MHA holdings and those at archives in Britain, but not TNA or NMM. The CLIP button shows our information on archive holdings for that official number, which includes the MHA, TNA and (some of) NMM holdings. There are further notes on that page.

A further link to the right More... links to the CLIP data page for the ship with that official number, including records in the Mercantile Navy List.

Shipping registers

For shipping registers, we list the ports for which the archive holds documents, and the years they cover.

You can see the list of registers for a port by clicking the link Details against that port or to see all the registers held at the archive, click Details for all ports

For some registers, we are able to provide further links to an index of the ships recorded in that register. This is accessed by clicking the Index against that register. This will list the entries in Folio order or they can be sorted by ship's name or by official number. Further notes are available on the index pages.

For the shipping registers held at Manx National Heritage Library, we are able to provide a transcript of each folio, including the names of individual owners, masters and builders. These names of individuals can be found by using the CLIP search page, here: People named in shipping registers

Data sources

The sources of this information are:

• the archive catalogue, mostly online;
• the TNA catalogue;
• our own lists, drawn from our transcription of crew lists and shipping registers.

We are glad to acknowledge the work of Robert R Le Maistre who compiled a complete index to the shipping registers for Australian ports. This used to be available on the National Archives of Australia (NAA) site. We used it as the basis for the index available on this site, with corrections against CLIP data and added links to the images to the NAA site.