A NZ maritime and
genealogical network
(22 October 2006)
A colleague and I are seeking expressions of interest in an informal network to link people interested in the area of overlap between genealogy and maritime history.
There are only a limited number of potentially interested persons so I am wary of getting too quickly into an organisation structure such as a formal “interest group” within NZSG auspices on account of the inevitable overheads in time that would involve. If a formal or sizeable group were to evolve obviously that would indicate a need that should be met. I would be happy to give it such support as I can (though I would probably stand aside from the leadership of it myself).
Either way, the present stage is to establish contact with potentially interested persons to find what they would hope for from such a network, what they could offer to it and what they might hope for that I and other colleagues might be able to assist with.
Amongst other things I am happy to list relevant interests of individuals and their contact details on this site and to organise a half-day or evening meeting in the Wellington area if/when there is sufficient interest and possibly to provide speaker/s for general genealogical groups.
A particular ambition of my own is to promote awareness of how ship and genealogical databases can better interface with each other. Another is to advance data projects of interest to both “communities” in ways that serve the needs of both. I reason that while probably only a few percent of NZ genealogists have an overlapping interest in ships, maritime ancestors or an ongoing interest in immigrant ships that they probably equal or exceed the number of people actively engaged locally in maritime research for its own sake. In principle there should be rewarding opportunities to pool knowledge and resources.
Relevant personal projects that I have in hand involve master indexes of British ships (to which files relating to immigrant ships and their voyages could be linked to advantage) and within that a master index of all NZ ships that will partially revise and update the well-known “Watt’s Index” of NZ ships and upon which can be piggybacked aspects of computerising and revising “Watt’s Index” that are beyond my personal resources. (I have an agreement with the NZ Ship and Marine Society to organise the computerisation and revision of “Watt’s Index”.) I am particularly interested in hearing from genealogists with a possible interest in working on the shipowners’ and masters’ information.
My goals in respect of immigrant ships involve building on computerising and extending the “Comber Index” of ship arrivals and linking the result to purely maritime databases in one direction for further information about the ships and in the other direction to link to indexes of where detailed passenger and crew lists are published and/or may be consulted. There is obviously an overlap in the latter aspect with the work on documenting passenger lists being done in the Auckland NZSG library (as reported in recent issues of the NZ Genealogist) with which I hope to discuss common ground and strategies in the near future. Distinguishing crew lists from passenger lists is a neglected topic. Much effort internationally involves hunting crew lists which locally are mixed in with passenger lists at Archives New Zealand while local genealogical recording appears to be exclusively concentrated on passengers.
There is
doubtless other work being done locally in the “maritime/genealogy overlap
area”. The purpose of this section of my site is to invite people to make
contact and indicate what they can offer and what more they might like,
nationwide by electronic correspondence and possibly through more direct
contacts in the
to contact me email: jloweresearch@ihug.co.nz
For the full range of my projects and maritime
interests click here for main maritime menu.
For the families I am researching under my
genealogical persona click here.