Agreements and crew lists
Ships and ships´ official numbers can be identified from Lloyd´s Register from 1764, and the Mercantile Navy List from 1857. The earliest surviving Agreements and Crew Lists date from 1835 to 1860 and are in series BT 98
, filed by ships´ port of registry to 1856, and by year and official number from 1857. This series also contains earlier surviving muster
rolls from 1747, and official log books of ships´ kept by the General Register and Record Office of Seamen. They are arranged by year and port of filing. A few logs survive from about 1852, but it was only from 1854 that masters were required to deposit them. The logbooks that have been kept are usually those that contain entries of a birth or death at sea, or log books of smaller vessels, which were printed on the same form as the agreement and crew list. The rolls include names and addresses of seamen, dates of engagement and discharge and the name of their previous ship.
Agreements and Crew Lists from 1861 are in the series BT 99. This series consists of a 10% sample of agreements and crew lists (with log-books where they survive) for the years 1861 to 1938 and 1951 to 1994. They are arranged by year in batches by ships´ official number. Some of the wartime lists from 1938 to 1950 are included in this series, but others are in BT 100, BT 380, BT 381, BT 385 and BT 387. A separate 10% sample of agreements for fishing boats is in BT 144 from 1884 to 1929. Of all those not taken by The National Archives, the National Maritime Museum (NMM) took 10% for the period 1861 to 1938 and 1951 to 1976 (and 90% for years ending in five), and County Record Offices also took some for the period 1863-1913. The rest, approximately 70% of the agreements and crew lists from 1863 to 1976, were transferred to the Maritime History Archive, Memorial University, St John's, Newfoundland, Canada A1C 5S7 http://www.mun.ca/mha/.
