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Our website is a good starting point for carrying out research but not everything can be found on the web. We have decades of experience working in libraries museums and archives tracking down information you are unlikely to find online. Our clients have included television production companies, well known authors and broadcasters, magazines and newspapers, museums, auction houses, family historians, students and old sea dogs. If there is something you cannot find why not contact our research service.


​Recently added:


Merchant Sail
Digital copy of one of our go to reference works. Perhaps the best source of information on 18th and 19th century U.S. merchant ships and shipping. Printed copies are rare and expensive.​
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Crew Lists of the British Merchant Navy 1915
Digitised crew lists available to search for free via a database featuring over a quarter of a million names. Contains all the surviving Merchant Navy crew lists from 1915. For details of the whereabouts of records for other years click on the Sailors menu at the top of this page.

Records of Bristol Ships 1800-1838
Published by Bristol Record Society lists all ships over 150 tons registered in the port of Bristol in that period. 

Log of Logs 
Ian Nicholson a commodore of the Royal Australian Navy compiled these three volumes which make up the indispensable reference work devoted to ships traveling into Australian and New Zealand waters between 1788 and 1990. It lists the whereabouts of logs, shipboard diaries, letters, reports etc.. This is the first place to look for information on emigrant ships and their voyages.

Lloyds Register Infosheet No.39 The Slave Trade     
A guide containing a brief history of the Trade and a list of sources for researching slavery and tracing African ancestors.

Practical Hints for Emigrants to our Australian Colonies
Probably published for the first White Star Line of Australian packet ships.

Legacies of British Slave-ownership
A database containing the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time colonial slavery ended.

The Journal of Edwin Mitchell, a 16-year-old boy who sailed from Belfast to California and back in 1866 on the ship Ivanhoe.
From the photographic collection of the Australian National Maritime Museum
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