Crew lists and agreements for British registered ships show the owner's name on the first page or the heading of the document, often with their address. However, though the ownership of a vessel was divided into 64 shares, only the managing owner is shown. In the case of ships owned by a company, it is often the company name that appears.

This is a list of the owners of a vessel as shown on the crew lists which CLIP has transcribed from the records held at local archives (so please be aware that this is only a limited list).

Our page on the registration of shipping has more information about how the ownership of a vessel was administered: Registration of shipping

How to search for the owner of a ship

Other pages link to this one using an official number, or you can search again by official number.

On the search form, enter the ship's official number in the range from 1 to 199550. This should be a pure number without wild-cards such as '*', '%', '?'.

Then click Search

Reading the results

The results are sorted in date order, showing the owner's Surname, Forename and Address. They show the vessel and her port, with the dates of the voyages recorded on the crew list. The archive holding the document is shown with their reference for the document, if available.

Using the results

The link on the right hand side of the table Transcript shows a transcript of the crew list. Bear in mind that we have only transcribed the main details from the document. The original will always contain more information, for example it will probably show the voyages made during the period covered by the document.

Data sources

This data is taken from the crew lists and agreements which are held at:

• Anglesey Archives - port of Beaumaris, 100% complete.
• Devon Archives and Local Studies - Devon ports and vessels with a Devonshire connection, 100% complete, including data from photocopies which they hold.
• Glamorgan Archives - port of Cardiff covering the years 1863, 1871, 1881, 1901 and 1911. This project is ongoing at the archives.
• Lancashire Archives - Lancashire ports, 30% complete, data transferred from transcripts made by Lancashire Family History and Heraldry Society volunteers.
• National Library of Wales - port of Aberystwyth, 100% complete, data transferred from transcripts made by NLW volunteers.
• Portsmouth History Centre - ports of Portsmouth and Cowes, 100% complete.
• Southampton Archives - documents for Union-Castle vessels, 100% complete.

The documents cover the period 1863 to 1913.

Other sources

For more detail of the ownership of this ship, you can use the Mercantile Navy List (MNL) which from 1865 shows the owner of the ship. You can view images of MNL using links on the Ships by official number page. Stepping through the years will allow you to track the ownership almost year by year. One further note, though - MNL was based on returns from local shipping registers, so the ownership data may lag behind changes. Data from the crew lists is more likely to be accurate, because they were written close to the time of a voyage.