By Peter McCracken
ShipIndex.org is a unique database that has, as my co-founder brother once put it, “a very narrow focus, but very broad application.” The database helps you discover which books, magazines, websites, databases, and more, mention the ships that matter to you. Perhaps you know that an ancestor served in a navy, and you know from their service record which ships they were on, and when. If you research the histories of each of those ships, you’ll learn what your ancestor experienced, even if the resource doesn’t mention your ancestor directly. Or, perhaps ShipIndex.org can help you find an image of the cruise ship that took your grandparents on their honeymoon. That can be a great picture to add to a history that you’re compiling of their lives.
ShipIndex.org offers a free database, which has over 150,000 citations that can be searched without any registration at all. The full database contains over 3.2 MILLION citations. Your local library might offer access, or you might want to subscribe on your own. You can also create a free account so that you can be notified when new content is added for the ship names that interest you.
With all those citations, you’re bound to find a lot of ships that share the same name. The forthcoming USS Enterprise (CVN-80) will be the ninth ship of that name in the US Navy, for instance, while the British Navy has had at least elevenships named Enterprise – and that doesn’t even include the ones spelled “Enterprize”! So, whenever possible, we have associated citations with specific hulls, which means we can bring together most of the citations that refer to different ships with the same name. We can also connect citations that describe different names for the same ship.
Maritime history connects the entire world, and one of my great joys in creating ShipIndex.org has been to learn about all sorts of resources that describe different parts of the world’s maritime history. As Emma Cox and I completed our conversation for the Journeys Into Genealogy podcast, Emma told me about work she’d done searching the shipping registers maintained by the Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, which were new to me. From there, I found a bibliography and learned of several books that are great candidates for the ShipIndex database, including Transportees from Gloucestershire to Australia, 1783-1842, which my local academic library has in its stacks. I’ll add citations to the book and the shipping register to my database, and soon others will be able to find the vessels that are mentioned in these useful resources, even if they didn’t know about either one. If you know of similar resources that should be added to ShipIndex.org, please do let me know, at comments@shipindex.org.
Peter McCracken, Publisher, ShipIndex.org
Listen to the podcast interview here: journeysintogenealogy.co.uk
