Latest news

UPDATE 18 November 2011
Temporary Exhibitions planned for 2012.
• Rush Library, Co Dublin opens 5 March for 2 weeks featuring 100 Rush seamen

See 'Further Plans' page for more details.

Article on 'Discharge Books, Identity certificates and Central indexes. 1900 to 1939 and beyond.
I have received a number of enquiries about discharge books and why there may be no voyage starts shown on a CR10 card. This is my attempt to explain the system. I hope it provokes responses. Read the article (PDF)
Irishmariners.ie in the press
The Inishowen Independent has a story on the Irish Mariners exhibition in Inishowen.
NOW ON VIDEO!
You can now watch a video on YouTube of David Snook talking about the website at a recent exhibition based on his work at Dundalk Museum. still from the video

What's on the site?


This website contains an index of nearly 25,000 Irish born merchant seamen contained in the CR10 series of index cards in the Southampton Civic Archives. The CR10 Archive holds 300,000 cards covering the multinational workforce of the British Merchant Marine during the period from early September 1918 and the end of World War 1 to December 1921. All ranks and jobs at sea are covered from master to scullion. A unique feature of the CR 10 cards is that they usually contain a good photograph of the seaman. At this time RS2 Identity books, with matching photographs were issued to the seamen.

Each card lists personal and foreign voyage details including ship numbers. I have used Microsoft Access 2002 to produce relational databases for seaman personal details, seaman voyages, and ship details.

Canadian seamen The database now also includes details of a small number of non-Irish mariners, Canadians in particular. In time these will be moved to a separate database.

Who are the photos of?

The photos in the banner at the top of each page come from the CR10 cards of four seamen from Rush. (left to right): Bartle McCann, Joseph Leonard, Edward Beashel and Joseph Beashel.
These cards cover the last two months of the Great War and the three years afterwards, which was a time of great change for the British Shipping industry. A boom in demand in 1919 and 1920 was followed by a slump, which was not helped by tighter immigration controls in the USA and Canada. On the technical side, express passenger liners such as the Cunarder Aquitania were converted from coal to oil fuel, which reduced crew numbers. Its not clear what effect the struggle for Irish independence had on the willingness of Irish seamen from the 26 counties to continue working in the British shipping industry. Jobs were difficult to get so perhaps they just adjusted their nationality on their identity books and moved across to Liverpool, Glasgow and the South Wales ports.

The website contains details of around 23,000 Irish born seamen which have been extracted after searching through all 300,000 or so cards contained in 154 boxes. I hope it will help to widen awareness of the CR10 cards in Southampton Civic Archives. Many of the photographs have the Wow factor. Contact Southampton to order copies of the CR10 cards. If you spot any errors please contact me.

Copyright: Unless indicated otherwise, all material on this site is copyright © 2008 by David Snook. All rights are reserved. The pages of this site may be freely linked to but not duplicated in any manner. You cannot copy and publish my pages/index in any format but you may use the facts contained in the index for your own personal research.

Website designed and built by Nigel Callaghan of Technoleg Taliesin Cyf.

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