Canada, British Vessel Crew Lists, 1881 on Ancestry

Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) has recently released another third party collection entitled Canada, British Vessel Crew Lists, 1881 on its site at http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=70757.

From the site:

The 1881 Crew List Database contains the names of seamen taken from crew agreements from voyages of British registered vessels ending in 1881. The year 1881 was chosen to coincide with the census taken in Britain in the same year. Records extracted from the database include name, vessel, official number, and voyage year. The crew lists themselves may contain additional details, such as:

age
place of birth
date and place he joined the ship
date and place when he left the ship or died
ship on which last served
position
wages

You can find an explanation of the headings on the crew lists on the Anatomy of an Agreement page at the Maritime History Archive website.

Unfortunately the link given on the site for the Maritime History Archive is coming up as broken just now, but the main site is is accessible at http://www.mun.ca/mha. Searches on the Ancestry site provide a basic return, after which you are then invited to follow a link to the Maritime History Archive for the record, though at the time of writing there seems to be a problem following through on the search to this site.

Chris

Now available for UK research is the new second edition of the best selling Tracing Your Family History on the Internet: A Guide for Family Historians. And for those wishing to take Scottish ancestral research a bit further, my next Pharos course, Scotland 1750-1850: Beyond the Old Parish Records, commences May 14th 2014.