The office of the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen administered the Agreements.The following information will help you evaluate whether the Agreement collection can assist with your research: Coverage of the MHA’s Crew Agreement Collection The new generation of academic researchers and of family historians have given us a sense of the richness of the stories contained within their pages. Meanwhile, scholars and students on campus, and our visitors, virtual and real, have explored some of the millions of documents. The main MHA website hosts additional information. Over the years, the archivists have facilitated searches of many kinds. But it assumes you will want to know more as you begin to see the experiences of ancestors and others in a different light. This site presumes no previous familiarity with the source. Some preparation is advisable before you use the collection. They are not digitized as yet, and are too extensive to be fully indexed by family name. The primary sources occupy a large space on the campus of Memorial University in St John's, Newfoundland, amongst the Maritime History Archive's manuscript collections. A timely intervention ensured their preservation, and in each generation of users, they go on to stimulate new thoughts about history and its making. Our commitment to this is stronger for the realization that as manuscripts, these records very nearly did not survive. One of the benefits of electronic media is the ability to render documents more readable and accessible. We encourage giving attention to the digitized and annotated Agreements in the “toolkit” part of the site. Our ability to show you the twists and turns of history as lived by these people builds upon the approach that started with understanding the evidence recovered from the archive. “Seafarers Tell Their Tales” exemplifies research as a grounded and reflective process. Stories provide a considered way into a past world in a third section of the site. It would be difficult, and very probably impossible, to attempt this for any other working group.
Meanwhile, in the section “Dead Men Do Tell Tales”, Official Logbooks sustain a discussion of the significance of the possessions that seafarers had in the workplace. The subsection “How do you know he’s a ‘sailor’” is so titled to play on the realization that not all seafarers were male, or worked under sail. Sometimes, taking the larger perspective means refusing the popular stereotypes of seafaring. The extent and comprehensiveness of the records mean historians’ questions about merchant seafarers can go on after the limits are reached of what can be asked about other groups. We seek to show these sources have a potential beyond that which you might have conceived for seafaring documents and their subjects. In its second part you will find accounts of nineteenth and early twentieth seafaring life drawn from the key record source, the Agreements and Accounts of Crew and Official Logs of British Empire vessels. The emphasis here and in the rest of the site is on “ how do we know about the past?”
THE CREW WEBSITE HOW TO
Instead, we show how questions framed with some knowledge of past times can lead you to the relevant information then we show you how to appreciate better the significance of your discoveries. We have not created finding aids as such. Its content, visual, textual, and aural, aims to make users familiar with the period sources for merchant seafaring. The website embodies, first, a research toolkit. “More than a List of Crew” exists to improve your chances of finding him or her and, while we cannot guarantee a positive result, discoveries come in very different forms: we think you will find the website’s approach to source-based historical research both interesting and rewarding. Maybe you are a visitor to this site because you already know that an ancestor made their living at sea, or perhaps you only suspect it. For family historians and academics alike the records are a goldmine of information. The historical circumstances that made merchant seafarers some of the best documented of nineteenth and early twentieth century workers in Britain and its colonies richly repay investigation. The “More than a List of Crew” Website Explained