Surnames from Ships and Seafarers of Atlantic Canada

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Surnames from Ships and Seafarers of Atlantic Canada

The surnames and company names in these pages are taken from the Ships and Seafarers of Atlantic Canada CD and are derived from two British record series, structured as three interactive databases that allow the user to search, sort and query the data.

The first database is compiled from the Certificates of Registry for ten major ports of Atlantic Canada, and for the port of Bermuda. The Atlantic ports include Miramichi 1828-1914, Richibucto 1880-1914, and Saint John 1820-1914 in New Brunswick; Halifax 1812-1889, Sydney 1820-1889, Pictou 1840-1914, Windsor 1849-1914 and Yarmouth 1840-1914 in Nova Scotia; Charlottetown 1787-1914 in Prince Edward Island; and St. John's 1820-1936 in Newfoundland. This series contains information on the vessels registered in each port and on their owners.

The second database is compiled from a sample of crew agreements of vessels registered in the ports of Saint John, New Brunswick, and Yarmouth, Windsor and Halifax, Nova Scotia for the period 1863-1914. This file contains information on the masters and seamen who crewed the vessels, their ports of call and voyages. In total, the sample contains information on 182,000 seamen and 20,000 masters of Atlantic Canadian vessels.

A third database contains a one percent random sample of crew agreements from non-Canadian (British) vessels which was compiled for comparative purposes. The data is arranged in the same format as the file describes above and contains 85,000 records of individual seaman and 19,000 records of masters.

From these files over 63,000 unique surnames and company names emerged and it is these names which appear in the following web pages.

To obtain more information on the Ships and Seafarers of Atlantic Canada CD visit the Ships and Seafarers of Atlantic Canada page or the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project page on the Maritime History Archive web site.