Guest Post: Genealogy and Maritime History, by Peter McCracken of ShipIndex.org

 This is a guest post by Peter McCracken of ShipIndex.org:

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Genealogy and Maritime History

by Peter McCracken (c) 2024

Maritime history is, obviously, an important part of genealogy – but not just for the reasons that most people think. We know, of course, that most people who emigrated up until the 1950s or 1960s, whether by choice or by force, did so by sea. And finding the vessel that brought an ancestor to Ellis Island is an obvious place to start one’s genealogical voyage. But maritime history provides so many more ways that people can learn about their ancestors, from just ‘adding leaves to the tree’, to discovering incredibly valuable content about specific ancestors and their experiences through maritime records.

My website, ShipIndex.org, helps people discover which books, magazines, websites, databases, and much more, mention the ships that matter to them. There are over 150,000 citations in the free database, including many core books in maritime history, plus subject headings from OCLC’s WorldCat. The subscription database now contains over 3.5 million citations, and is always growing. We link to free content on the web, directly to book pages in HathiTrust, or help you find a nearby library that owns the book you seek. The site comes from my dual interests in maritime history and in research (during the day, I’m a librarian at an Ivy League university), and my long-held belief that we need to make maritime history research easier to do.

To create ShipIndex.org, we’ve taken the indexes in well over 1100 books, journals, websites, and more, and put them into a single large database, organized by ship name. Since there are many, many ships with the same name, we differentiate between them whenever possible. So if you look at Wasp, for which there have been many US naval vessels (and a few British) with that name, you’ll see that, whenever we can, we assign citations to an entry about the specific USS Wasp, not just a USS Wasp. This work must be done by hand, though, so progress can be slow.

But how can you use ShipIndex to learn more about your ancestors? First, it’s important to know that ShipIndex.org focuses on ships, not on people. My small company cannot compete with the big genealogy powerhouses, and my interest in maritime history means that the site focuses on ships, not on people. But people operate ships, people build them, people travel on them, people vacation on them, people serve on them, and people work on them. Through all these paths, maritime history research can help you learn more about your ancestors.

For example, the large genealogy databases will regularly help you determine what ships your ancestors emigrated on, and can often guide you to passenger lists. But there’s more much to learn, as well. If you know that an ancestor served on a specific naval vessel, and you know their dates of service on that vessel, then finding an in-depth history of that vessel and its activities will tell you about your own ancestors’ experiences. You might even find a cruise book – basically a yearbook for a long deployment – that includes an early picture of your ancestor.

Or if you know the vessel that an ancestor emigrated on, you could possibly find a journal or a logbook kept by someone on board, through OCLC’s WorldCat. WorldCat maintains a record of the books and manuscripts that are held by libraries around the world (though with a decidedly US-focus). Staff at WorldCat created a list of relevant subject headings for ShipIndex, which I then added to the free database. As a result, you can find books or manuscripts that are by or about ships, which includes logbooks or personal journals kept by people on board these ships. If a library or archive holds one of these journals or logbooks, and has put a record of it in WorldCat, then you could find it through the subject headings included in ShipIndex. (Because of changes in WorldCat, this has recently become more difficult, but it is still possible.  And  manuscripts often appear with no holdings noted in WorldCat. See this ShipIndex blog entry for information about how to track them down.) Your ancestor may not be mentioned in the journal – though imagine if they are! – but even so, you’d get a sense of what your ancestor’s voyage was like, through the description of someone else who was on board during the same voyage.

Or, if you’re just looking to add leaves to the tree, imagine finding a picture that you could add to your records, showing the cruise ship your grandparents sailed on during their honeymoon. Because ShipIndex has such an extensive inventory of ships, it can also be valuable in confirming the name of a specific ship. At a genealogy conference in England several years ago, a researcher explained to me that she’d been looking for information about a ship called “Maid of Sussex” for quite a while, without success.

Since we could look for all ships with “Sussex” in the name (the ShipIndex database has extensive, if admittedly confusing, advanced search options), we discovered a small square-rigger named “Sussex Maid”, which was likely the ship she’d actually been seeking, along a great image from the State Library of South Australia. 

Maritime history can be a very useful tool for learning more about your ancestors. ShipIndex is the best way to do efficient maritime history research. 

If you’d like to explore ShipIndex for yourself, start with the free database, and if you want to try the full database, feel free to use the coupon code “SEAVER” for 25% off monthly renewing   access to the database, for as long as you subscribe.

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