Expert’s Choice

Dr Martin Wilcox is the author of Fishing and Fishermen: A Guide for Family Historians (Pen & Sword, 2009)

“British seafarers of the late 19th and early 20th century are the best documented workers that there have ever been…” So reads the homepage of CLIP, the Crew Lists Index Project ( crewlist.org.uk). This long-running, not-for-profit hub, which was created by Pete and Jan Owens, has changed the landscape for family historians.

Crew lists were introduced for fishing vessels in 1883, and are often referred to as ‘agreements’, being effectively contracts of employment between the owner of a ship and the members of the crew, signed by both parties before it sailed.

Although the survival of these records is relatively good, they are widely dispersed. You will find them cropping up in specialist repositories, city and county archives, museum collections and local-history libraries, as well as The National Archives in Kew and the Maritime History Archive in Newfoundland, Canada.

CLIP functions in a number of ways: as a searchable database of names recorded on crew lists, a link to other online databases, and a finding aid to track down the location of original documents so you can investigate further.

The website also offers vast amounts of data about British merchant shipping, with references to approximately 200,000 ships registered in Britain between the 1850s and 1950s. Much of the data here is free to access; a lot is also available to members of Findmypast ( findmypast.co.uk). Add to this CLIP’s research guides and exhaustive links, and you can see why the website is adored by both maritime researchers and family historians.