England Occupations Water Transport Services - International Institute

Water Transport Services
The following deals with the majority of seafaring occupations categorized as services other than those in the Royal Navy. Many sailors who were in navy and merchant services served apprenticeships. One should remember that a sailor may have stayed in the navy or the merchant service for his whole life, but may equally well have changed jobs according to the availability of work, his age and health, being pressed into the navy, etc.

Merchant Marine
Mercantile mariners records are completely separate from the Royal Navy and controlled by the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen (RGSS) in Cardiff as part of the Board of Trade. Their early records (pre-1941) have only recently been transferred to the Public Record Office at Kew and microfilms of the BT classes are now becoming available worldwide. If you have an ancestor whose occupation concerns the sea or inland waterways, such as captain, master, mate, seaman, mariner, boatswain (bosun), or super cargo (supervisor of merchant cargo) they were probably employed on a merchant ship rather than by the Royal Navy. A certain elitism caused many navy men to add R.N. to their occupational title, which is handy for their descendants in differentiating them from merchant seamen. Caution should be used, however, with the designation master mariner, as not everyone referred to in this way actually had a master’s certificate. Christopher Lloyd, in The British Seaman, estimated that in 1800 the British merchant service had 15,000 ships and almost 127,000 sailors (quoted by Smith, Watts and Watts).

Major authors are Watts and Watts (My Ancestor was a Merchant Seaman. How Can I Find Out More About Him?, 1991), Imperial War Museum (2000), Smith, Watts and Watts (Records of Merchant Shipping and Seamen, 1998), and Herber (Ancestral Trails) also has good sections. The National Archive (TNA) leaflets concerning RGSS (Registrar General of Seamen and Shipping) records are:

These sources should be used in conjunction with the FHLC Merchant Marine listings under Great Britain, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

Shipping
From the Middle Ages the state promoted the domestic shipbuilding industry and developed sufficient navy manpower for wartime situations. A series of Navigation Acts from the time of the Restoration (1660) onwards forced British merchants to use British built ships and predominantly British crews. The Shipping and Navigation Act of 1786 made compulsory the registration of ships with the Registrar General of Shipping under the Board of Customs. In 1854 the Merchant Shipping Act shifted the responsibility for merchant ships to the Board of Trade. The records were therefore largely created by the government and historic ones are now housed in the BT classes at the TNA.

Owners of ships and investors in trade were keenly interested in the progress of ships and another record system developed alongside the governmental ones. Edward Lloyd’s coffee house opened in the city of London around 1688 and became a centre of commercial activity especially for maritime ventures and insurance. This developed into the Corporation of Lloyd’s concerned with seafaring activities, whose historical records over 10 years old are at the Guildhall Library, and the separate Lloyd’s of London insurance company. The Corporation of Lloyd’s history is given by Barriskill (A Guide to the Lloyd’s Marine Collection and Related Marine Sources at Guildhall Library) which has replaced Hall, whose book is essential to understanding their valuable marine collection. In order to keep track of British merchant shipping, and other nations’ ships arriving at British ports, dozens of publications aimed at investors and owners were produced including news sheets and annual registers. The three most useful ones for family historians are discussed here:

Lloyd’s Register of Shipping
This is produced for the insurance market and gives extremely detailed information on construction, dimensions and other particulars, owners, registration, voyages and casualties of each ship of interest to Lloyd’s, whether or not it was British. The earliest volume surviving is from 1764 and from here until 1880 are. The information services officers Jones and Taaffe (Lloyd’s Register of Shipping in Family and Local History Handbook 6th edition) have provided a very readable history.

Shipping Gazette and Lloyd’s List
This was a weekly, and later daily, record of ship arrivals and departures for each port, as well as losses and inquiries into shipping. Publication commenced in 1741 with indexes from 1838, but it does not appear to be microfilmed yet. Some extracts appear below.

Extracts from Shipping Gazette and Lloyd’s List 30 Sep 1889 

The Times newspaper had an extensive shipping section that reported regular Foreign and Home arrivals and departures, as well as reports of marine emergencies. The report for the Mountaineer mentioned above is very similar but gives the additional information that about 50 passengers were on board. Many other ports had newspapers that specialized in shipping news.

Lloyd’s War Losses
These are indexed volumes covering ships lost through enemy action. The ports of departure and intended arrival are noted, its position when lost and the cargo, and number (and some names) of crew and passengers carried, plus how many were saved and lost.

Extracts from Ship Losses May 1941

From ''Lloyd’s War Losses: Second World War Vol i/I 1939-1942. British, Allied and Neutral Vessels Sunk''.

Mercantile Navy List
This is the official Board of Trade list of all merchant vessels registered in Britain, and has been published since 1850. The data given includes the vessels’ name and official number, port of registry, tonnage and other construction details (including date of construction from 1871), name and address of the owners (from 1865). For 1857-1864 there is also a list of men holding master and mate certificates. One volume, date unspecified in the FHLC, is on film.

Registers of Ships
The ownership of a ship was traditionally, and since 1825 legally, divided into 64 parts. Masters, carpenters and other craftsmen were often given one or more shares as part of their wages, and as an inducement to good construction work and profitable voyages. Thus many ordinary people could dream of when my ship comes home and they would become wealthy. There was no central registration service for ships until 1786.

Prior to this details of ships over 15 tons, all her owners and masters were usually kept by the customs house at its home port and a certificate of registration provided by them. Many port registers have been collected by county archives or survive in customs houses in ports. From 1786 transcripts of these port registers were sent to London and these included any changes in ownership (known as transactions). They are in BT 107, with an index to ships’ names in BT 111, but not all survive from local ports before 1814.

In 1854 a revised system came into being and each ship was given an official number and its transcripts and transactions were kept separately. Transcripts for 1855-1889 are in BT 108, with an index to ships in BT 111, whilst transactions from 1855-1892 are in BT 109 referred by number from the transcripts. In 1889 another system was introduced wherein as the ship was deregistered after loss, scrapping or sale abroad, all of its papers were filed together. These files are in class BT 110. There is a TNA leaflet D94 on Merchant Seamen: Registration of Ships, 1786-1994.

Board of Trade Register of Shipwrecks 1855-1898 These are by date and there is a TNA leaflet M43 covering ships wrecked or sunk.

Civil Registration for Ships
From 1854-1890 separate lists were kept for seamen and passengers. There is a TNA leaflet D61 and further information in Smith, Watts and Watts.

Births, Marriages and Deaths of Passengers at Sea BT 158 contains births 1854-1887, marriages 1854-1883, and deaths 1854-1890 taken from the captains’ logs. They are ; the format varies but they do have indexes. Examples from are shown below.

Births, Marriages and Deaths at Sea

Register of Deaths at Sea of British Nationals This series from 1875-1888 is and give the ship’s name and official number, name, sex, age, date of death, rank or occupation, nationality, last place of abode, cause of death and whether a passenger or crew member. There are separate volumes of information for England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Register of Births at Sea of British Nationals This series from 1875-1891 is and give the ship’s name and official number, date of ship’s arrival in port, name, sex, date of birth, name and occupation of father, maiden name of mother, parents’ nationalities, parents last place of residence. There are separate volumes of information for England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Combined Lists of Passengers and Seamen 1891-1972 From 1891-1972 the records are in BT 334.

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