Where can I find out more about a death at sea?

QOn the reverse of this photograph of Owen Lewis Williams, born in 1867 in Bangor, it states he was lost at sea on 13 August 1887, on the Bacchus. He was the only child of Elizabeth Lewis who lost her first husband, Owen’s father, at sea and subsequently re- married Hugh Hughes. I have searched several sites to try to find out exactly what happened. There are plenty of lost seamen named Owen Williams, but no references to the Bacchus. Carole Lewis, by email

ASometimes the details of an ancestor’s death at sea in family records are rather vague, but in this case we not only have the name of the ship, Bacchus, but a precise date: 13 August 1887. The ship was heading home to Liverpool from the Cape of Good Hope, so it was a British ship. The Wrecksite database ( wrecksite.eu) does not show the loss of Bacchus in 1887, and neither does the online index to Board of Trade wreck reports ( www.plimsoll.org/WrecksAndAccidents/wreckreports). If the ship didn’t sink, Owen’s death was perhaps the result of some sort of accident.

The best way to approach this is to identify the ship concerned. The Crew List Index Project itemises British ships registered after 1855 by name ( crewlist.org.uk/data/vesselsalpha.php). If you search this website for Bacchus, you’ll find only one vessel registered at Liverpool during the 1880s, and it had the official number 60005.

If anyone died at sea, then it was usually written on the crew list with a note about the cause. The crew lists for the voyages of Bacchus in 1887 are kept at the Maritime History Archive (MHA) in Newfoundland, Canada. You can check this by visiting its website and entering the official number in the search engine ( www.mun.ca/ mha/holdings/search combinedcrews.php). Contact MHA via this website and ask for a quote for supplying you with a copy of the crew list. It is a bit expensive, unfortunately, but it is your best hope of finding out what happened.

You can discover more about Bacchus from the 1889 edition of Lloyds Register of Shipping ( lrfoundation. org.uk/ public_ education/ referencelibrary/registerof-ships- online). You’ll see it was an iron-hulled sailing ship, 216 feet long, built in 1867 and owned by Hughes and Company. Since you’ve presumably not found a death certificate (GRO registers of deaths at sea are available on several of the subscription sites), I suspect Owen slipped from the rigging or was washed overboard from this ageing ship during a storm. Simon Wills

If anyone died at sea, then it was usually written on the crew list with a note about the cause