Tag Archives: 19th century

All “aboat” searching for ship registries in LAC’s collections

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By Elaine Young

Did you know that Canadian vessels over a certain size have had to be registered with government authorities as far back as the 18th century? Library and Archives Canada (LAC) holds various types of records related to the registration of vessels and has recently transcribed and made searchable almost 84,000 of these records. The transcriptions include the ship’s name, port of registry, registration number and year of registration, all key fields for researching the rich (and sometimes surprising!) histories of the vessels. These records are a vast resource for researching maritime history across Canada and are also a genealogical tool for tracing the family lineages tied to those ships.

This transcription project is part of LAC’s effort to improve research into the records in its collection. LAC took custody of these records, many of them ledger books, in prior years as Transport Canada (the regulator) moved increasingly towards digital recordkeeping. To support digital access to the records, LAC took digitized copies of some of these ledgers and worked with researchers in the field to identify the best information to transcribe.

The transcribed material relates to ships that were operated then de-registered (closed out) between 1838 and 1983. It includes vessels from the Atlantic, Pacific and inland waterways.

These registries contain a wealth of information about each vessel, including a description, the type of ship, its size, the ownership and when it was built. The registries offer valuable insights for anyone researching shipbuilding, shipping or coastal and open ocean industries. For example, over time these records illustrate the transition from wind to steam-powered ships, as well as the introduction of fibreglass and composite hulls. The records also contain information relevant for genealogical research, as many ships were passed down within families.

Example of a typical ship registration:

Page one and page two of the registration document for the ship M.C.M. The document has been filled out using both a typewriter and by hand in cursive writing.

[M.C.M., Port of Registry: NEW WESTMINSTER, BC, 9/1914] R184, RG12-B-15-A-i, Volume Number: 3041. (e011446335_355)

The first page of this register for M.C.M., a ship registered in 1914 in New Westminster, British Columbia, contains details about the ship such as its construction, size and so on. The second page includes the names of the vessel’s owners over time.

The caption above demonstrates the naming convention that users will see in Collection search: Vessel name / port of registry / a consecutive number assigned for each vessel newly registered at that port in a year / year of registration.

To find the records on LAC’s website using Collection search:

1. Go to advanced search
2. Select “Collections and Fonds” under Collection
3. Select “Ship Registration” under Subset of Collections and Fonds

Screenshot of the Collection search advanced search page. The “Collection” and “Subset of Collections and Fonds” drop down menus are marked with orange boxes.

How to locate Ship Registrations in Collection search. (Library and Archives Canada)

4. To search specific word(s) in the database, enter them in the search bar at the top. You may also enter a date or date range in the Date field (this will reflect when the ship was closed out). If you prefer to browse all ship registrations, leave the fields blank and click “Search.”

Screenshot of the Collection search advanced search page. The search term “Dora Mae” is entered in the “All of these words” search box, and the date range of 1940 to 1950 has been entered in the date range boxes. These fields are highlighted with orange boxes.

How to narrow down your vessel search using keywords and date ranges. (Library and Archives Canada)

For a more specific search, use the “All of these words” field at the top to search by name, port of registry, official number and year of registration.

Name:

  • The name is assigned by the owner at the time of initial registration and usually lasts the lifetime of the vessel, but it can be changed (often when there is a change of ownership).
  • Once a vessel has been closed out, there is a waiting period before that ship’s name can be used again. Two vessels cannot have the same name at the same time.
  • Vessels may have similar, but different names (for example, Karen Dawn, Karen and Dawn, and Karen & Don). Adding a Roman numeral after a name that had been taken remains a common way to create a new name (for example, Dora-Mae II).

Port of registry:

  • The port where the vessel was registered.
  • Vessels may be registered in ports close to where they were built or operated.
  • This can be useful in identifying shipbuilding activity in a specific area.
  • Vessel registration may have passed to different ports over time, as owners were expected to update their ship registration to the closest port of registry when they moved or if the ship was sold and transferred to another region.

Official number:

  • The unique number assigned to a vessel when it was registered—no other vessel will ever have this number.
  • The number remains the same for that vessel’s life, even if it is no longer in service or destroyed.
  • The official number can help you find information on that vessel in other record types:
    • Appropriation books: books that include the inventory of official numbers assigned to various ports of registry
    • Transaction books: books documenting supplemental transactions when the two pages per vessel in a registry book were filled
    • Construction books: books documenting ships under construction
    • Ship dockets: individual files opened by port of registry offices for specific ships

Year of registration

  • The consecutive number, starting from 1, assigned to each ship that was newly registered / (slash) the year that the vessel was registered. For example, 22/1883 would mean the 22nd vessel registered at a particular port of registry in 1883.

The closed-out ship registries can also be accessed via LAC’s staff research list, which provides direct access to the records at the series level. From there, you can navigate to individual ship registration records.

The new searchable ship registries transcriptions make tens of thousands of records accessible in a way that was not possible before. Users can now more easily research information on family histories, shipbuilding, shipping and many other areas. This valuable resource illuminates the complex and varied histories of Canadian shipping and shipbuilding, the communities built around these trades and the lives of the individuals and families who owned these vessels.

The team and LAC wish to thank Don Feltmate residing in Nova Scotia and John MacFarlane residing in British Columbia, who have been tireless advocates for the importance of these records and for making them more accessible.

Additional resources

Elaine Young is an analyst in the Partnerships and Community Engagement Division at Library and Archives Canada.

Don’t take it for granite: Geological Survey of Canada photographs

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By Martha Sellens

Several years ago, I was contacted by a researcher who was looking for the first photograph taken on a Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) survey expedition. They knew that the photograph was held by Library and Archives Canada (LAC), but they were having trouble finding it. At the time, I knew only a little about the GSC records that LAC holds. When I started looking into the GSC photograph collection, I immediately understood why the researcher was having difficulties. There was a lot of information about the collection, but not all of it was available to the public on our website, and what was available was difficult to navigate.

With a bit of digging and a few false starts, I was able to find the first photograph and a few others that the researcher was looking for. Together, we examined the glass plate negatives and fragile photograph albums at LAC’s Preservation Centre in Gatineau (fragile materials like these don’t travel from the storage site).

I was hooked. The GSC photograph collection has a huge variety of photographs taken across Canada as part of survey expeditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yes, there are many photographs of rocks, as is only fitting for geologists, but there are also photographs of landscape views, Indigenous peoples, wildlife, European settlements, Chinese immigrants and the Canadian Pacific Railway, as well as other subjects.

The first GSC photograph was taken in 1860 by James Richardson on his expedition along the north shore of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the Strait of Belle Isle. It shows one of the expedition members sitting on a ridge of rock. The GSC photograph collection is numbered sequentially, and the photographs that Richardson and his assistant, Mr. Reeves, took on this expedition have GSC negative numbers between 1 and 28. At LAC, we have some of the original glass plate negatives as well as prints of the photographs.

A black-and-white photograph of a man sitting on a ridge of rock.

GSC Negative 1, James Richardson, 1860, taken on his expedition to Quebec and Labrador (a038063)

After finding those photographs and learning more about the GSC photograph collection, I was determined to improve their description so that more people could make use of them. But how? The majority of these photographs were transferred to the archives in the 1970s, long before our current computer systems and databases were in use. Many of my predecessors have worked to improve the description of the collection over the years, and it was frustrating to see that their efforts could no longer be accessed or understood by the public for technical reasons.

A black-and-white photograph of a train engine that has fallen on its side in a river. Workers are visible on raised train tracks. The background includes trees and mountains.

Grand Trunk Pacific Engine No. 6 derailed at Fiddle Creek, Alberta, D.B. Dowling, 1911, GSC negative number 18883 (a045437)

My first step was to review the existing information that we had about the collection. The GSC photograph collection includes nearly 30,000 photographs. The existing finding aid provided online was a 150-page PDF that compiled a report, a box list, and a number of original captions in one giant document. In the late 1990s, LAC staff also created a dedicated database to make it easier to find individual prints and negatives. However, that database was never available online. Another issue was that it had to be migrated into a new software format in 2016, and some of the functionality was lost.

A black-and-white photograph of eight surveyors sitting to the left of a campfire.

Camp fire group, D.B. Dowling, 1911, GSC negative number 18916 (a045420)

Analyzing and comparing all of this data became one of my work-from-home pandemic projects. Given the scale of the collection, I wasn’t able to do this work on an item-by-item level. Instead, I focused on two aspects of the collection: the photograph albums and the finding aids.

When I started, only two of the 78 photograph albums were described in our database. Now, each photograph album is described in LAC’s online database with information about the photographer, the geographic locations, the dates, the relevant GSC expedition, and the negative numbers assigned to the photographs by the GSC. I was also able to sort many descriptions of individual photographs into the albums where they are found.

A black-and-white photograph of a square-rigged sailing ship with three masts surrounded by ice. A person stands on the ice to the left of the stern.

S.S. “Diana” with rudder crushed in ice off Big Island, Hudson Strait, A.P. Low, 1897, GSC negative number 2198 (a038232)

When it was available, I also included information about the GSC survey expedition depicted in each album, and I provided a reference to the original field notebooks also in the collection at LAC (see R214-65-1-E). James Richardson’s field notes (Québec – Manitou River and Île des Esquimaux regions and locations on Newfoundland) even discuss when he or his assistant took photographs!

I also created new finding aids by consolidating information from three or four different sources, so that researchers and archivists didn’t have to check multiple locations to learn everything. Through this process, I was also able to identify inconsistencies and errors, to ensure that the information was as up to date as possible.

A black-and-white photograph of a landscape view. A calm river runs through the middle of the photograph with trees on either side. A person is visible on the rocky shore in the middle distance.

Brokenhead River, Manitoba, at lowest rapids, J.B. Tyrrell, September 29, 1891 (a051459)

Now, if you’re looking for a photograph in the GSC collection, you can check one of several new finding aids that I created to find negatives (Finding Aid 45-36 Geological Survey of Canada Negatives), albums (Finding Aid 45-36 Geological Survey of Canada Albums) or prints (Finding Aid 45-36 Geological Survey of Canada Prints). The listings are not complete, but they provide information about nearly half of the photographs in the collection, and the updated format is easier to read and search. Most of the photographs in this collection are identified using a GSC negative number, like James Richardson’s GSC Negative 1. Sometimes we have both the original negative as well as one or more prints of the same image. For others, only the negative or a print have survived.

A black-and-white photograph of sled dogs in harnesses and people in parkas. There are snow-covered trees in the background.

Dogs resting near Split Lake, Northwest Territories, J.M. Macoun, 1910, GSC negative number 14917 (a045274)

LAC also has many of the original catalogue cards that the GSC used to organize negatives in their photograph library. The cards often include the GSC negative number, photographer, date, location, and caption. Sometimes the cards will also mention if the negatives were damaged or broken. Portions of the cards are organized by location, subject, or negative number, so they can be used in different ways to find specific photographs. However, since the cards were created by the GSC, they don’t have LAC container information listed on them. These cards need to be used with the other finding aids to locate each item. But they are also useful for contextual information that we haven’t yet been able to add to LAC’s database. If you have found an interesting photograph, and want to know more, you can check the catalogue cards to see if they have any further information there.

My work on improving the GSC collection is far from over, but I hope that the new finding aids and descriptions will help more people to explore this fascinating collection.

Additional resources

  • Geological Survey of Canada Photographs (R214-419-X-E)
  • Photograph album: Quebec and Labrador 1860, James Richardson (R214-2999-9-E)

Martha Sellens is an archivist in the Government Archives Division at Library and Archives Canada.