After we find our ancestor on a ship’s passenger list, most of us want to find out more about the ship and even see what it looked like. There are several websites that can help us do this.
The site called Maritime Timetable Images, found at www.timetableimages.com/maritime/index.htm, focuses on the shipping lines, their timetables, ports of call, and their brochures. This site covers shipping lines and the fleets they operated in the era from the 19 teens to the latter part of the 20th century.
One of my ancestors came over from Bremen, German, to New York on a ship called America. Using this site, I clicked on “list of ships” and found two named America. One was operated out of Italy, so it was immediately ruled out. I found that the other one was run by the United States Lines and their ports of call included Bremen and New York. I was able to view a series of brochures from the United States Lines spanning over the years and listing all of the ships they operated and all of their ports of call. This site has photographs of some of the ships but definitely not the majority. For that, you will have to visit another site.
One site that has many photos and pictures of ships is located at www.photoship.co.uk/index.html. On this site, you can browse the ship galleries, browse other (shipping related) photos, or browse the paintings of ships. Unfortunately there is not a search engine at this time, but the list of ships can be downloaded as a pdf file and then searched. But I found it very easy just to click on the first initial of the ship I was looking for and then just pan down through the alphabetically labeled thumbnail photos until I found the picture I was looking for. I found three photos of the August Belmont, a ship my dad served on in World War II. I also found several different photos of the City of Rome, a ship that some relatives sailed on from England to the United States.
On the Register of Ships website, located at http://users.xplornet.com/~shipping/Lloyds.htm, the viewer can get details about a ship such as its official number or code letters, the name of the ship’s master, its rigging, tonnage, drought under load, dimensions, when and where constructed, years of operation, its mode of propulsion, the ship’s owners, voyage information, and its port of registry and port of survey. This information was transcribed from Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping from 1764 to 2003.
The Great Ocean Liners site at www.thegreatoceanliners.com shows select pictures of ships with their descriptions, decade by decade, from the 1830s to the 1960s.
Great Ships, at www.greatships.net/shipslist.html, is a postcard collection of many of the passenger ships, organized by shipping line. It’s definitely worth visiting just to browse through the postcards of the past (including views of the Titanic).
Saving the most impressive site for last, check out The Ships’ List at www.theshipslist.com/index.html. On this site you can go through passenger lists, learn about shipping companies and their fleets, look up ship descriptions, view samples of ships’ rigging, peruse ship arrivals at various ports, read diaries and journals of passengers with details of their overseas voyages, research marriages at sea, learn which ships wrecked at sea (including where and when), read about the Irish famine immigrants of 1847, learn how the Civil War affected shipping in 1862, view pictures of selected ships and more.
With all of these websites to go through, you are bound to find something of interest that is meaningful to your research.
*http://www.tribstar.com/features/history/genealogy-websites-aid-in-researching-information-about-ships/article_ce66adfa-529e-57db-8a58-50885e935865.html
