This page is a transcript of a single folio from a shipping register.

The British shipping registers used standard forms which were used throughout Britain and the then colonies and while the exact format used changed over the years, the data recorded remained sufficiently consistent to make it possible to use a single transcription system to record and present the data.

For more detail on shipping registers, please see Shipping registers and for more on the Isle of Man registers, see Isle of Man shipping registers .

Reading the data

The several sections of a shipping register page provide details of:

• The registration of the ship, showing the ship's name, year of registration and the number of that registration (eg 34/1845). Official numbers were used from 1855 and often added as annotations for ships registered before then.
• The closure of the registration or a transfer to another port was often written in red ink across the page, there being no designated place for it.
• The physical details of the ship, including her tonnage. There are sometimes records of changes to the ship, which we have not recorded.
• The ownership, often shown as number of 1/64th shares. From the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, a managing owner or ship's husband was shown.
• The name of the builder and the place of building.
• The names of masters in earlier registers.
• Transactions relating to the ship, such as transfers of ownership and mortgages. Where there were many transactions, they were continued onto another folio at the back of the same register, or in a separate transactions register. We describe below how to find these extra folios easily.

The folios frequently contain much more information, such as changes of measurement, correspondence, etc. We have not transcribed these details, so if they are of particular interest, we recommend perusal of the original document or images of it.

To find other folios relating to that ship, there is a button at the top right of the transcript which links to a list of register entries for that official number. Unfortunately, this will not work for earlier registers where the ships had no official number. In this case, the bottom of the transcript may include a note taken from the folio itself giving directions to other folios.

Data sources

The sources of the data are images of the shipping registers for the Isle of Man ports held at Manx National Heritage Library, Douglas. We made these transcripts as a proof of concept but to transcribe many folio pages in detail is an arduous task and one that we do not intend to repeat. However, the database structure and the web pages on this site provide a proven framework to which more data can be added from other sources should it become available in the future.