Liverpool & South West Lancashire FHS - Forum

70% of Crews lists and Log Books are held in Newfoundland and each year while I have been attending the show I always ask them is there any plans to index the crew lists in your holdings. at Present you can only search by official number of the ship and many of us dont know what ship our seafarers sailed on. While at their stand with Phillip I asked again and you will be pleased to know they have started indexing crew lists for 1881. They are up to box 10 it will be about 3 years before completion but this will be a great resource in helping us locate our seamen including my great great grandfather Joseph McCormick who was always away at sea at the time of the census.

Is this the National Archives that will be doing this?

No

The National Archives only hold Crew Lists up to 1863 and some for well known ships Lusitania and others. They were going to throw the rest in the bin. Liverpool and surrounding records office took about 10% many for ships relating to their port and the Maritime archives in Canda took the rest. Here is the link to read what holdings they have. The lists they have are not name indexed and you can only see if they have a crew list for a ship by knowing the official number of the ship they sailed on. In most cases I dont have a clue what ships my gt gt grandfather sailed on so I have not been able to establish if the Joseph McCormick born Liverpool 1840 is mine. So by them starting to compile a index of Seamens names it should make it easier for those of us with seafaring Ancestry.

http://www.mun.ca/mha/holdings/searchcombinedcrews.php

I hope you are lucky, those prices aren't cheap either!