Here you may investigate two of the most common types of Crew Agreements by means of in-text annotations. They are a Foreign-Going Agreement for a voyage in 1870/1 made by the sailing ship Juno, and a Home-Trade six-month Agreement for the Brio, a steamer in service in 1908. While blue buttons are your guide to the format of the document, green buttons provide access to information about a member of the crew of each vessel. You will come to know Henry Johnson and William Cram better as two of the seafarers featured on the site, but bear in mind that their careers, and their stories, are indicative of ancestors' experiences.
Vessels, voyages and crews are documented in the Agreements. Using the sample annotated Agreements on the site, we follow the careers of Henry Johnson and William Cram respectively to show how individual crew can be traced as they moved from vessel to vessel. You will learn about the life and work of Johnson, a Canadian seafarer employed in the North Atlantic in the late nineteenth century (on two occasions well beyond), and Cram, a seafarer who stayed close to the coasts of Britain in his work on steam colliers in the early in the twentieth century. We explore something of the trades in which they were involved and the commercial organization of shipping. Census observations in each case enable speculation on the lives of these men ashore.
Using a question and answer format this part of the site treats the genesis and development of the records generically known as Agreements. The history of the nineteenth and early twentieth century British imperial state's regulation of seafaring labour is fascinating in its own right.
In six shipping containers, in 1971, the Agreements were delivered to St John's. Only then was the preservation of their larger part guaranteed. Often, MHA staffed are asked why the Agreements came to be in Newfoundland.
To find the Agreements of a particular vessel and year, researchers have to locate a ship's official number: the MHA documents are filed by this number. Watching the video on this site "Welcome to the Maritime History Archive" will explain why: the following explains how you find a number, and then how you can check for what documents have survived and which now constitute archival holdings.
Cursive handwriting can often be hard to interpret. Reading Agreements and Logbooks comes with practice: there is no other practical way of recognizing the letters than frequent reading, and even then different masters have different writing styles. But here are a few tips and tricks to help you read the documents.
When seafarers signed a Crew Agreement in foreign ports or took liberty money or advances, they were more often given British pounds rather than the local currency (or at least they recorded the wages in British pounds). Here we help you understand that currency.
In addition to the acronyms used to identify record repositories, there is technical language used on this site which might lead you to consult this glossary
Here you may investigate two of the most common types of Crew Agreements by means of in-text annotations. They are a Foreign-Going Agreement for a voyage in 1870/1 made by the sailing ship Juno, and a Home-Trade six-month Agreement for the Brio, a steamer in service in 1908. While blue buttons are your guide to the format of the document, green buttons provide access to information about a member of the crew of each vessel. You will come to know Henry Johnson and William Cram better as two of the seafarers featured on the site, but bear in mind that their careers, and their stories, are indicative of ancestors' experiences.
Vessels, voyages and crews are documented in the Agreements. Using the sample annotated Agreements on the site, we follow the careers of Henry Johnson and William Cram respectively to show how individual crew can be traced as they moved from vessel to vessel. You will learn about the life and work of Johnson, a Canadian seafarer employed in the North Atlantic in the late nineteenth century (on two occasions well beyond), and Cram, a seafarer who stayed close to the coasts of Britain in his work on steam colliers in the early in the twentieth century. We explore something of the trades in which they were involved and the commercial organization of shipping. Census observations in each case enable speculation on the lives of these men ashore.
Using a question and answer format this part of the site treats the genesis and development of the records generically known as Agreements. The history of the nineteenth and early twentieth century British imperial state's regulation of seafaring labour is fascinating in its own right.
In six shipping containers, in 1971, the Agreements were delivered to St John's. Only then was the preservation of their larger part guaranteed. Often, MHA staffed are asked why the Agreements came to be in Newfoundland.
To find the Agreements of a particular vessel and year, researchers have to locate a ship's official number: the MHA documents are filed by this number. Watching the video on this site "Welcome to the Maritime History Archive" will explain why: the following explains how you find a number, and then how you can check for what documents have survived and which now constitute archival holdings.
Cursive handwriting can often be hard to interpret. Reading Agreements and Logbooks comes with practice: there is no other practical way of recognizing the letters than frequent reading, and even then different masters have different writing styles. But here are a few tips and tricks to help you read the documents.
When seafarers signed a Crew Agreement in foreign ports or took liberty money or advances, they were more often given British pounds rather than the local currency (or at least they recorded the wages in British pounds). Here we help you understand that currency.
In addition to the acronyms used to identify record repositories, there is technical language used on this site which might lead you to consult this glossary