Developing the
contact point and overlap with genealogists
(new 18 May 2006)
I plan to further develop this theme but here are some starting points.
A significant minority of genealogists are tracking maritime ancestors and are therefore potentially as interested in developing maritime history resources in general as anybody though obviously with a special interest in ship movements (meet them at http://www.mariners-l.co.uk/ in particular). A much larger minority – perhaps even a majority in NZ – are hunting passenger arrival records and therefore have a very direct interest in ship arrivals (but little interest in the return passages to the immigrant source countries which does set their interest apart). All have a considerable interest in the nature of the ships and the experiences of the crew and passengers as part of the historical context of their ancestors’ lives. All want photographs of ships.
Mariners’ List (http://www.mariners-l.co.uk/) is a very interesting combination. I don’t really even know whether to classify it as maritime history or maritime genealogy which must mean that it is both. The starting point is very definitely maritime ancestors (people wanting to track migrants by sea are directed to the Ships’ List at http://www.theshipslist.com/) but there’s a lot of very solid ship stuff on Mariners’ List and many of its regulars are clearly there for the ships (as mostly am I). Browse the Mariners’ List archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/mariners To search Mariners’ List archives go to http://searches2.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl and enter Mariners in the Name of List box.
Obviously, maritime historians have contributions to make in terms of understanding the nature of ships and 19th century voyaging conditions and developing the ship side of overlapping information resources. There’s a good basis for introductory contact here. I had major reservations about the technicality of my stuff for a non-specialised audience but tried it out on a small group of genealogists recently as an experiment. They showed by their questions that they understood what I said about databases and indexing and the relevance to their interests.
The logical major point of connection between the two interest groups is records of ship arrivals that link to indexes and databases of ships in the maritime history direction and to passenger and crew lists in the other.
The work on crew and passenger lists by genealogists is voluminous but the outputs are often only sorted by personal name which is natural given that their primary target is individual people and the ships are secondary to that. While you can generally search by ship name if you already know it, ships are generally not presented in chronological order of ship arrival or capable of being sorted by the external user in that way. There’s scope for changing that to mutual advantage. We could get a lot more out of their work if they do and that should enable us to link our work more directly to theirs to their advantage. Obviously it is up to us as maritime historians to show that it is worth their while, though any additional effort is likely to be very minor if built in at the strategic moment.
Some of their
resources branch out from indexes that in form and content are close to a
starting point for ship arrival lists from which the respective maritime and
genealogical interests could “fan out” on either “side”. The monthly indexes of
It is desirable
to develop linkages between different sets of port arrival and departure records,
for every port’s arrival is another’s fairly recent departure and vice versa.
Tracking ships is valuable in its own right. Cross-matching arrival records in
one place to departures in others must help to improve the reliability and
consistency of all transcriptions, handwriting and clerical accuracy being what
they are. One entry in the
Most genealogical projects have generally not included ship indexes in their passenger arrival project indexes in a form as amenable to development to service the common meeting point – principally I am sure simply because no-one suggested it and there was nothing in place to give them any reason to think there was any point in doing so. I am aware of major projects that for all practical purposes are completely useless in their published format for tracking or identifying ships but which could have provided this output for virtually zero effort if provided for at the strategic moment in the project design. Some may yet be able to do so depending on the format in which they hold their raw data (any relational database could be promising).
The Victorian
“outwards passengers to NZ” project deserves special attention from the NZ end
as their ship departures are NZ ship arrivals by definition. Roughly half NZ 19th
century overseas ship movements were to and from
Obviously, worked examples from the maritime history side demonstrating the advantages of “interdisciplinary collaboration” are called for.
One collaborative
approach to research resource development
The http://mariners.records.nsw.gov.au/ team reinforce their efforts through the stratagem of a (qualified) offer that “we give you the pages you need that we haven’t done yet in return for you transcribing a batch of information to go into the common resource”.
If the idea of this type of strategy appeals to anyone or you would like to support my approach anyway, I can offer similar “deals” in respect of some of my sub-projects and some other resources. Refer projects
to proceed to Low-tech approaches to information sharing
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