Documents by archive

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.

The sources of this information are:

• the archives' catalogues, mostly online,
• The National Archives (TNA) Discovery facility, which combines TNA's catalogue with data from the defunct Access to Archive (A2A) project, and
• our own lists, drawn from our transcription of crew lists and shipping registers.

For more detail, where possible we link to the archive's catalogue, or TNA's Discovery. Unfortunately, several archives have catalogues driven by software called DServe, which is best described as 'user hostile'. It needs considerable patience to use, is often slow, or just locks up. In due course, where we can do so we aim to copy data onto the CLIP database so that it can be better accessed. However, it is important to make use of the archives catalogue to cross-check our data because archives are continuing to catalogue and re-catalogue these documents and our data may be out of date.

For crew lists, we list the ports for which the archive holds documents, and the years covered. Where possible, we link this on to details for individual vessels.

For shipping registers, we list the ports for which the archive holds documents and the volumes which they hold. For some documents at one or two archives, we have been able to make an index by folio (page). For the port of Rochester volumes we provide links to the archive's images of the register. For the Isle of Man documents, we are able to provide a transcript of each folio, including the names of owners, masters and builders. These names of individuals can be found by using the 'People named in shipping registers' search page.