How can I get records of Thomas’s maritime death?

QMy ancestor Thomas Lawrie (1874–1917), appears in the Deaths at Sea Register ( BT334) with these details: age 43, rank 2nd Mate, birthplace North Shields, name of ship Hain Min, date and place of death 18 July 1917, Chefoo. I contacted the General Register Office ( GRO) for a death certificate, but they said: “We only have registrations of events which occur on British Registered ships”. What now? David Bond, by email

ANormally when someone dies at sea, the master of the ship has a duty to report it to the relevant Registrar General at the first appropriate port. This is usually annotated onto the indexes (now on Findmypast) with E for England, S for Scotland, I for Ireland and W for Wales. As you see from Thomas’s entry, the annotation is missing. The month is also shown as November – some time after his death.

Thomas actually died ashore in Chefoo and was probably moved back to the ship following his demise for the formal recording of the event. And here we encounter the first difficulty. The ship Thomas was serving on was not the Hain

Min but the Hsin Ming, registered in Shanghai and belonging to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company (CMSNC). It was not a British ship and one that would probably never call at a port where the death could be registered. So how did his death make it on to the marine register?

As Chefoo was a Treaty port, it had a consulate, so I checked the register of consular- registered deaths in FO 681/19 at The National Archives. Thomas was not recorded there. I went back to the death register and the biggest clue was in the final column, where ‘C & D’ is recorded for several other men’s records. ‘C & D’ is a pre printed crew list often used to record deaths of crew, particularly when there is more than one. This document is handed over to the Registrar and becomes the legal information about those deaths that is entered into the register. In Thomas’s column, it says not ‘C & D’ but RG54377, which looks more like a correspondence reference. I suspect that someone from the CMSNC wrote to the Registrar General about Thomas’s death and unless that letter survives at the GRO, his death will remain a mystery.