A record to learn about

The crew lists can be found at https://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk. There are approximately 39,000 crew lists on the website and these contain the names of over 750,000 mariners.

The site is free to access and you can search by the mariner’s name or the name of the ship. For the ninety percent of 1915 crew lists held at the National Maritime Museum, a digital image of the original document can also be viewed.

It’s only possible to search by the mariner’s name if the crew list has been digitised. Where crew lists exist only in paper form (which is every year except 1915) you will need to know which vessel your family member served on and in which year the voyage ended (this determines the date of the crew list).

Transcripts of some crew lists held in over 40 record offices can be viewed on the Crew List Index Project (CLIP) website at www. crewlist.org.uk.

The surviving original crew lists for British vessels are held in a number of repositories in the UK and Canada. More details can be found in the National Maritime Museum’s Research Guide C1: The Merchant Navy: Tracing People: Crew Lists, Agreements and Official Logs. This is available on the Royal Museums Greenwich website at https://familytr.ee/rmg.

The crews of British merchant ships came from all over the world. The example pages from a 1915 crew list here are from the ship Kelvinbank, whose crew members during this voyage included seamen not just from the British Isles, but Hong Kong, Singapore and India.

Seamen of non-european descent may be listed on separate Asiatic Agreements which are not usually present in UK archives. However, during the period from 1941 until the end of the Second World War, all seamen were listed on the same agreement.