RLP 260: Shipindex with Peter McCracken

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 260 Ship Index with Peter McCracken Welcome to research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at FamilyLocket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a Pro A Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research Like a Pro with dna, Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com breakdown Genealogy Brick Walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi, everyone Welcome to research Like a Pro.

Diana (53s):
Hi. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (55s):
I’m great mom. how are you doing?

Diana (57s):
I’m Doing well. What have you been working on?

Nicole (60s):
I’ve been adding some things to my timeline for the Dire project and you know, I discovered this couple in Granger County, Tennessee who have a lot of descendants who are D N A matches to the Dire descendants. So I’ve been doing some research on them, forming a timeline about them. It’s James Dyer and his wife Betty, spelled b e d e y or Biddy. Mm. So I’m thinking her name is short for obedience possibly. Anyway, I’ve been kind of finding them in census records from the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. And then their children all seem to have gotten married in that county, in Granger County.

Nicole (1m 40s):
So that’s what I have so far in my timeline. And one thing that’s been really fascinating is seeing a common surname among a neighbor. And the objective of my project is to find the parents of my husband’s ancestor, John Robert Dyer and one of his associates had the surname McKinney, and this James Dyer and his wife Betty. They also lived near John A. McKinney in Granger County, which neighbors on John Robert Dyers County. Hawkins County. So I am really intrigued by this McKinney connection and I’m hoping that it will turn out to be something useful.

Diana (2m 12s):
Nice. Sounds like you’re making good progress on that.

Nicole (2m 16s):
Slowly

Diana (2m 17s):
Every little bit is progress. That’s awesome. Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our Airtable quick reference guide for sale on PDF on our website and for our research Psycho Pro Webinar series for the month of July, we have an exciting Webinar that will be presented by our team member Alice Childs. And the title of this one is Who Are the Parents of David R Matheson, A DNA case study And the description lets you know a little bit about what this will be about in the localities. David r Matheson immigrated from Nova Scotia to California as a young adult where he later married, had two children and died young at the age of 42 Documents created through David’s life in California failed to identify the names of his parents.

Diana (3m 3s):
This case study will discuss how following the research I could Pro with DNA process helped identify David’s ancestral family, identify and eliminate paternal candidates and solidify biological relationships to both parents. So this was really fun. I worked on this with Alice and there were a lot of Mathesons in Nova Scotia and it was really interesting seeing how the DNA and the documentary work helped to finally separate them out and hone in on the correct father. So, you know, anytime you’re dealing with same name people or multiple people that could be candidates, it’s so interesting to hear how you can actually figure that out.

Diana (3m 44s):
So it’s gonna be a great Webinar. Great. And we have our Research Like, a Pro Study Group beginning this fall and registration is ongoing. So if you’ve been thinking about that, hop on the website, check it out, see if you’re interested in joining with us from the end of August into November. And if you’re interested in being a peer group leader, we’d love to have you apply all of that you can find on our website. And please join our newsletter to get coupons and get the latest news.

Nicole (4m 14s):
Well, today we’re excited to have a guest. His name is Peter McCracken and he has been an electronic resources librarian at Cornell University since 2016. And prior to joining Cornell, Peter worked as a reference librarian at East Carolina University and the University of Washington in 2000. He co-founded Serials Solution, which was acquired by ProQuest in 2004. In 2009, he co-founded Shipindex dot org, which helps people do research on vessels. Peter received the Ulrich Serials Librarian Ship Award in 2011 for his work with Serials Solutions and was honored with a distinguished alumni award from UNC School of Information and Library Science in 2012.

Nicole (4m 58s):
He has published scholarly and non scholarly articles in many journals and wrote a quarterly column titled Maritime History on the Internet in C History Magazine from 2004 to 2020. Hi Peter, thanks for coming.

2 (5m 13s):
Hello. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Diana (5m 15s):
Well, we’re so excited to learn more about this. You know, that’s what we love about doing Genealogy and Family history is there’s always more to learn and this is a subject that I’m excited to ask you questions about and have you really give us an insider’s look at how we could use this database, Shipindex dot org that you’ve developed to further our research. So let’s just start with that. What is Shipindex

2 (5m 42s):
Ship Index is a database. It tells you what books, magazines, websites, databases or other resources, whatever there might be out there tells you which of those resources mention the vessels that you want to learn more about. So it says, Hey, this book or this, this database or this magazine they mentioned this particular vessel. Its real focus is maritime history. And maritime history is something that I care deeply about. But that’s very applicable in Genealogy research as well.

Diana (6m 17s):
Absolutely. Because if we’re here in, in the States, our people all came over usually on a ship until the days of airplanes. Right? And so often we have those and we have those in our own family history, the names of the ship that came over. And sometimes I can find a little bit online about those, but I am guessing that Ship Index helps you dig much deeper in getting into some of those published sources that maybe just don’t pop up in a Google search.

2 (6m 44s):
Yeah. And it will guide you to many resources that you wouldn’t otherwise find because they’re, they’re really not in Genealogy, that’s not where they expect to find them. Another area that I think is really valuable for genealogists is if you know that someone served on a merchant vessel or a naval vessel during a war, or they were at sea or something, maybe you know that they were on board from this date to that date and you’d like to learn more about what their experience was. Even if you don’t find a mention of that person, you can find out what happened on board that vessel. And you, since you know that they were on board at that time, you know that they were experiencing that as well.

2 (7m 24s):
So it’s another way of learning a bit more about the experiences they had. Also people, if they wanna add leaves to the tree, say add a picture of the ship that their Ancestors, their grandparents went on a honeymoon on, say you’re putting together stuff, a booklet and you’d like to have a little bit more information, that might be a, a useful photograph to add just on the side.

Diana (7m 49s):
That’s great. Those are some fun examples.

2 (7m 52s):
I’ve had some remarkable experiences at Genealogy conferences. I, I was at a conference in Cincinnati and a man came up to me and he kind of barked the name of a ship at me and I looked in the database and I, you know, in two or three seconds click click and there’s a picture of this vessel and he said, oh my goodness, that’s the ship that I came to America on when I was four years old. Oh. And he ran off to get his wife and he brought her back and he pulled out his camera. This was 10, 12 years ago and he was taking a picture of the screen, so I had to take a picture of him taking a picture of the screen cuz it was, I thought it was very funny. And of course I gave him the information that we found there. But that sort of thing is really interesting and exciting.

Nicole (8m 32s):
Wow, that is really exciting. I love that. You know, I’ve seen in family trees where people will have pictures of the ships that their Ancestors sailed on as like their profile picture or just one of the gallery pictures in the family tree. And so I think that’s one of the things that Chip Index can help us with is finding those pictures. Tell us more about where those pictures are coming from in the database

2 (8m 55s):
For pictures of ships now, especially in the 19th century, the 18th century, it can be very hard to find illustrations of specific vessels. I just don’t think that they exist very often. But when they do, we can help you find them because I take the indexes to, to books for example. And if that index indicates that a particular page has an illustration of a vessel or passenger lists or crew lists for a vessel, we note that. And so in the database you can limit to results that have illustrations or results that have passenger or crew lists as well.

Nicole (9m 33s):
That’s great. So I think now would be a good time to tell us more about how we can access Ship Index. Is it available for all? Is there a cost involved? Where would we go to find it and that sort of thing?

2 (9m 46s):
So I started this as a project when I was working as a reference librarian at the University of Washington. and I didn’t have any intention of making it into a business. And so I got the URL ship index.org and I didn’t bother to get the.com at any point. So everything that I put in at that time, plus some extra citations, are all in a completely free part of the database. You don’t have to register to use that, it’s just 150 or 160,000 citations that are totally freely accessible. Everything that I’ve added since I, with my brother, decided to create an actual company out of it, they are all in the subscription database, which now has over 3.2 million citations in it.

2 (10m 34s):
And people can Subscribe for either a set period of time that’s cost $6 for two weeks of access up to $65 for a year of access, or a monthly recurring at $8 a a month. So I don’t believe that it’s very expensive and I think that it’s a unique tool for finding information that you just, you just wouldn’t be able to find otherwise.

Nicole (10m 58s):
Fantastic. You know, it definitely sounds like it would be a time saver for research of this sort and help you get the information more quickly.

2 (11m 6s):
Yes. I think that there are lots of resources that Genealogists wouldn’t know about otherwise. See, you might find we have all these resources from the Navy Records Society, which has been publishing primary documents in British Naval history for I think 120 years or so. Well you know what, if you find a mention of a vessel that an ancestor sailed on or, or served on, you wouldn’t of course normally go through all the Navy records, society volumes looking for these things, but Ship Index can help you Discover that those citations might actually exist.

Nicole (11m 40s):
Yeah, that’s so true. You wouldn’t know to look there unless you had done extensive research into what resources are available about ships. And it sounds like you’ve done that work for us.

2 (11m 51s):
I, I would like to think so.

Diana (11m 53s):
Well, I’m just looking, I am signed on as a guest and looking at some of those 150,000 citations. So I thought I’d just read a couple for our listeners so they get an idea of what this is. You know, when you say citations, well what does that mean? So for instance, we have the first one and there’s a little box that tells you whether it’s on the web, it’s from a journal, it’s a book, you know, it kind of tells you the type of source. Then you have the title. So this one says 1881 British Census Crew and Passengers on Ships arriving in New South Wales. And then that’s on Find My Past. And then there’s a little orange underneath that, another orange box that says resource requires subscription because Find My Past is a subscription website, but then you have a direct link to go there.

Diana (12m 43s):
So that’s really neat that we have so much information on that just from your citation. And then some of the others, you know, reference again more Find my Past. But I think this is really fascinating. This one is a journal article from for the American Neptune, so I’m assuming that’s a journal 1941 to 1990 and it’s published in Salem, Massachusetts and part of the Peabody Essex Museum I’m guessing. So that would definitely be something that we probably would never think to go look at to find out more information. So interesting.

2 (13m 21s):
Yes, there’s all sorts of great stuff in there. One of the first resources that I added was this one called Merchant Sale by, I think it’s William Fairburn. And he wrote this six or seven Volume history of Atlantic American and Atlantic Canadian Maritime History. And then he just mailed these volumes to libraries around the country in the 1940s or 1950s I believe. And the last Volume is a incredible index to the whole thing. And that whole Volume is in, or the index to the resource is in the free database. Hmm. And when the book is available in Google Books or Hoti Trust, we have Links directly to the page actually in question.

2 (14m 6s):
So you can find information from Starbucks history of American Will fishery for example. And then another part that is in the free citation are subject headings from World Cat, the directory of Library Holdings in the US and around the world. And that can be really incredible. It can be very difficult and they’ve made some significant modifications that make it a bit more challenging now. But it is possible that one could Discover a handwritten journal that was written by someone who is on the same immigration voyage as one’s ancestor. I mean imagine even if they don’t mention your ancestor in their journal of the voyage.

2 (14m 46s):
But wait, imagine if they do that would be incredible. Again, they’re telling you what your ancestor experienced on that voyage. It’s a really interesting connection that informs your understanding of your Ancestors experiences, even if it doesn’t mention them by name.

Diana (15m 5s):
Absolutely. And we, we talk about that all the time. I love to use county histories in the United States for the same exact reason. You learn all about the community. So this is just another way to add to their experience, their community. So looking at the website, we don’t search by people on this, we search for the ship. So first we have to have done some research to know the name of the ship or perhaps narrowed down some of the ships that they could have been on. Is that how you would approach some research like this if you maybe didn’t know the name of the ship?

2 (15m 40s):
Yeah, there’s no way that I could compete with the amazing, you know, really large collections that exist out there from by my past and my heritage ancestry and, and all of those. But that in fact is not really my interest. My interest is making vessels more visible. Right, right. Making maritime history research easier to do. And if you have a mention of the the ship than an ancestor emigrated on and you know the name of it, then we can help you learn more about it.

Diana (16m 8s):
Great.

2 (16m 9s):
It’s not the first place you’re gonna go of course, but when you wanna learn more about your ancestors’ experiences, it can provide connections that I believe you, you wouldn’t find any other way. Perfect.

Diana (16m 21s):
Well you, this is your life work, you know this better than anyone and I’m sure you’ve just made so many interesting discoveries. So I’m, I’m excited about this. I have several Ancestors on my whole maternal line. My mom’s side came over in the 1850s, 1860s and I’m pretty sure we know the names of the ships that they came on because they did leave written histories. So I’m gonna have to use one of those and see what I can Discover more, more. The interesting thing I’ve found is that the ship’s passenger list, which I’m kind of assuming would be the correct name of the ship, doesn’t really always agree with what’s in the history, which is always kind of funny that how did the name of that ship get changed so much, you know,

2 (17m 7s):
So, you know, I’ve, I’ve found some really interesting experiences exactly in that in working through collections of records for immigrants traveling to Australia, there are folks who have done a lot of transcriptions of handwritten documents for Australian voyages and I collected all of that information and I was preparing to put it into the database and I would find, hmm, this ship name doesn’t exist anywhere else. I wonder if this is really correct, but, oh look, the captain’s name is similar with another one and the tonnage is the same and I can feel pretty certain that the transcribed name of the vessel is not correct.

2 (17m 47s):
And when I go look at the pdf d f of the document, I say, oh, I can completely see why the transcriber wrote down what they wrote because it was, it was handwritten and they understandably misread that. But because I have this larger set of data about the whole collection there, I can say, ah, in that case I believe that they made a mistake. And so I make a correction in the entry, although I keep the old name just in case I I wasn’t correct. Or if you had informa, I mean it couldn’t be useful because you Discover, oh this is a common misspelling of this particular vessel name, but it’s one of those places where the aggregate data actually makes it possible to correct individual errors and make that more discoverable and it makes it more accurate.

Diana (18m 38s):
Nice. It’s all about being a good researcher, looking at the details, doing some correlation there.

Nicole (18m 43s):
Well mom, you know, I’ve done some research on our ancestor Sarah Jane Miller who came across in 1856 from Liverpool and the ship that she was on is called the Enoch Train. And so I typed that into Shipindex dot org and it came up with a long list of citations to different books and things that has some that are free to look at and some that you need to Subscribe to view. And one of the results is leading to an encyclopedia. It says Ships of the World, a historical encyclopedia published in 1997. So that’s neat. So now what I would do is go find this book in the library or find it on Amazon.

Nicole (19m 26s):
It’s great that there’s a link to do both of those things. Either find it in the library, find it at a books, find Amazon, then I can access the resource and learn more about the Enoch train. So that’s kind of an example of how you might use the database.

2 (19m 40s):
And I’m just looking at the Enoch train as well right now. and I, I followed the link to WorldCat and it shows some entry Sailor’s accounts with Benjamin Thompson ship Enoch Train 1872 to 1873. And this was a voyage that traveled to Hong Kong and Manila and I believe it was a little bit later than you mentioned. But here’s one particular resource that’s held at Bowling Green State University. Let’s see, I guess I could follow the link and, and learn a little bit about it from the bowling green entry, but there we could Discover, oh this is great Links here and here’s another, you know, train link from, from WorldCat as well, a Log book from 1873 and some others from earlier as well.

Nicole (20m 22s):
Oh, fantastic. You know, I haven’t explored WorldCat very much, but this is such a great additional website, the Ship index, and it’s great that you link to it from Ship Index and you know, I’m seeing some books in WorldCat relating to the Enoch train that are about my Ancestors pioneer journey. She was in the handcart companies of 1856 after several of these people, there was a big group of them that came over together on the Enoch train and then they completed their journey to Utah using the hand carts. So this is neat to see some books here about them. Cool.

2 (20m 59s):
Yeah, I I think definitely find some resources here. I’m, I’m getting distracted by them. In fact,

Nicole (21m 5s):
By

Diana (21m 6s):
What are we going down a rabbit hole here? Yes.

Nicole (21m 11s):
It’s too fun.

Diana (21m 12s):
Yeah, it is. It’s always exciting to Discover something new, a new place to look understandable.

Nicole (21m 18s):
Right. And the historical context is so valuable to understand what it was like for them to be on the ship and how the journey was and, and some of those resources. In fact, when I was writing a, a narrative about Sarah Jane Miller, I did have access to a diary of another person on the ship and it was just wonderful to see what that journey was like for her and the fact that they all coordinated cleaning schedules of different parts of the ship and had broken up into different wards in order to eat dinner at certain times. And it just really shed some light onto what that would’ve been like on the journey.

Diana (21m 52s):
Right. Well one of these articles about the Enoch train is in that same journal that I mentioned earlier, the American Neptune and looking at at it on WorldCat. I see it, there’s a copy several places near me at Brigham Young University’s Library, university of Utah Library and the Family Search Library. So I could easily access that journal and see what article was written about it. That would be so fun.

2 (22m 19s):
Yeah, American Neptune was, was unfortunately it’s no longer published, but it was the premier Journal of American Maritime History and as you noted it came from Peabody Essex Museum in in Salem.

Diana (22m 31s):
Very interesting. And see, this is a journal that we haven’t heard of. Now we know it’s something new. Oh well

Nicole (22m 35s):
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Nicole (23m 25s):
You can even save it directly to your ancestry Tree For listeners of this podcast, newspapers.com is offering new subscribers, 20% off of Publisher extra subscription. So you can start exploring today. Just use the code FamilyLocket at checkout. Well Peter, I’m kind of curious, how did you get the idea to even start Ship Index?

2 (23m 47s):
Well, I’ve always been interested in maritime history, perhaps a result of growing up in Seattle. And when I was in library school at the University of North Carolina, I spent the summer between my two years of library school working at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine. And as I worked through archives there, I went to learn a bit about the Sewell Ships of steel that I was doing research on. And I’d have to go and look book by book by book in the Maritime Museum’s library. And at the time the library itself was a closed Stacks collection, so visitors to the library couldn’t go through those books themselves. And of course it’s a wonderful library, but it doesn’t have everything.

2 (24m 30s):
And so there are many other books that aren’t in that collection and I thought there must be some directory, some way of finding which books mention which vessels. When I couldn’t find that, I started creating it myself. A year or two later I was working the archives at East Carolina University where I was working on a second master’s in maritime history. and I read this handwritten journal by these, these two characters who walked from Virginia to Alabama in the winter of 1890 and then in the spring of 1820 they sailed down to New Orleans and they sailed on don don’t know it was the General Butler or something like that. and I thought again to myself, how can I find out about that ship, about this unknown vessel?

2 (25m 11s):
It’s not a Titanic, it’s not Constitution or anything like that. And those were the ideas that got me started on creating what became Shipindex.

Nicole (25m 23s):
I love that story because it really highlights when we need something that doesn’t exist, it’s time to make it ourselves. Right.

Diana (25m 31s):
That is exactly right. Well you mentioned, you know, really developing this interest in maritime history from your years in Seattle and then on the East coast as well. And I’m just curious, what was it that just drew you to that? You know, do you have any family history of people serving in the Navy or just the love of the ships? The water.

2 (25m 55s):
I love the idea of the, the space of the ocean in a way. I mean the sense that it is, it is the ultimate interdisciplinary topic and in fact it often gets ignored as a result. But that space between places is, is so critical. And also it has had such an enormous impact on human history. Of course, anybody who’s traveling long distance, the vast majority of people who are traveling long distances before the development of airplanes went by sea. And even long after airplanes became common, it was still a very common way for people to travel by sea.

2 (26m 35s):
My stepfather traveled from England to Australia and from England to the United States by sea. So that’s not that long ago. And then of course it remains an incredibly effective way of transporting goods as well rivers and, and across oceans too as well. And, and just water generally speaking has been a critical part of American and world history and the whole culture that goes along with it is also I think very, very interesting. So it always had this, this pull for me that I can’t totally explain, but I’ve been lucky enough to be able to have the opportunity to do a lot of research in the area and and continue studying it whenever possible.

Diana (27m 18s):
That’s so fascinating. and I love what you said about the water that so much happened on the water. You know, think of all the great naval battles throughout history and I. Think of my own dad who was in the Navy and sailed from San San Francisco to Guam onto China at after, you know, the bombs had been dropped in Japan. So he never saw active duty, but he saw that part of the world through a ship and it really is fascinating to think about how important these ships have been in transporting people all over the world. So Wow, that’s yes, absolutely. Really opening our eyes to, you know, some new possibilities for research.

Nicole (28m 2s):
Well tell us, Peter, have you researched your Ancestors and learned about any of their ships or immigration?

2 (28m 9s):
I haven’t done a lot of research a in my, my own Genealogy, my grandmother was a librarian, as was her sister and when I was probably 10 or 11, I flew out to visit her and my grandfather in Oklahoma City and sh and we spent a week doing a bunch of Genealogy then and I collected all that information and whenever she would come out to Seattle we would go to places to do research at the, you know, the Mormon church in Seattle, which had a large library there. So there is a lot that I have and I have a lot of the family’s papers now I know that Ancestors Thomas and Thomas Cena Hale married in the 1660s in London and then ended up in Newburyport, Massachusetts a few years later.

2 (28m 51s):
So there’s a great example of where I, you know, where I could start it. Although that 1660s is pretty hard to identify what vessel they, they might have sailed on to come to America then,

Nicole (29m 2s):
Huh? That is quite a long time ago. But I wonder if there’s some article in some journal somewhere that would talk about ships sailing at that time period since it was such a founding era of the country.

2 (29m 14s):
Yeah, one thing that I often like to talk about when thinking about how one does maritime history researcher or really any kind of historical research is to think about who was keeping records and, and what did they do with those records. And of course with Castle Garden and Ellis Island in the United States, that’s when we started, you know, keeping a lot of records prior, of course there were records kept by various custom houses and things of the sort. But going back even further, if, if nobody felt a need to actually record the arrival of of individuals, it might not have been written down exactly what vessel they arrived on, for example.

2 (29m 57s):
But I think the idea of thinking, okay, who might’ve written this down and then what might’ve happened to those records is a really good way of trying to think about where to start doing that kind of research. That

Nicole (30m 10s):
Is such a good concept.

Diana (30m 12s):
Yeah, I love that idea of who would’ve written it down, why did people care about this record? And just learning about that, learning about the, the record keeping of the era that could really help you. So interesting. And then branching out, like we’ve talked about the histories, you know, could there be a county history, could there be a history of the area that maybe names the ship that some of these immigrants came on? You know, there’s so many different avenues that sometimes we don’t think about in our research, so it’s always good to broaden our mind a bit. So what about ships of the same name? Do we run into that with the database in this type of research? We, we absolutely do.

Diana (30m 52s):
Okay.

2 (30m 52s):
And it was a real challenge early on for me to try to figure out what to do here with the Enoch train example that we were looking at, just looking over these notes, I, this is not a vessel that I knew anything about, but there’s clearly, you know, there was the the 19th century immigrant vessel and then there were very clearly there was a liberty ship that was built in during World War II with the same name. There’s obviously not the same vessel. We could see a couple of different ships at different times. There was one out of Glasgow in 1874 it looks like, although that might have been the first Enoch train. So, and then when you look at other vessels you find, you know many more examples. There have been I think eight different u s s wasps.

2 (31m 34s):
For example, recently I was looking at, in response to a message from a a subscriber, I was looking at the Alabama and there’s U s s Alabama’s and there’s CSS Alabama and there are many others. And when you look at, at a woman’s name for example, Sarah or Mary or Maryanne or Elizabeth, you find so many vessels with those names, it becomes a real challenge. What we have done in Ship Index is we’ve said, okay, how can we differentiate between these ships that have the same name? The way we do that is we use a wiki data identifier. Everybody’s familiar with Wikipedia, which has these written encyclopedia entries in multiple languages and of course they’re a Wikipedia entry in English is very different from a Wikipedia entry on the same topic in French or in Chinese or in Spanish or in Thai or any other language.

2 (32m 26s):
They’re not translations of each other. As I understand it, the folks at the Wiki Media Foundation said, okay, well we need some way of tying these things together. Also a database would be really useful in a lot of different ways. And so what they’ve done is they’ve created these queue identifiers and they can represent a person or a place or a concept or a ship. And so each one is, is unique. So if you look up u s s constitution in Wiki data you get, or if you could start a Wikipedia and there’s a link to the wiki data entry as well, you will find this one Q identifier that represents all of the different versions of that particular ship and and Links to all the different language entries for that.

2 (33m 11s):
So the point is that there are multiple Q identifiers, basically one for each hull for everyone that is named WASP or Elizabeth or whatever, wherever there are one for each one that is represented in Wikipedia. And so we use that wiki data identifier to differentiate between the various hulls that have the same name say what we do then is we have staff who are doing this. So it’s complicated, it’s a little bit tedious and it takes a lot of work, but we say, oh I can tell from this citation that it is referring to this specific U s s Alabama say, or this the CSS Alabama for example.

2 (33m 53s):
And then we connect those together. So if you go to the entry for wasp, you’ll find multiple different sort of cards, one for each of those vessels, plus you’ll find many citations below where we don’t know which vessel it refers to. Now we’re never gonna get all of these citations linked to particular vessels because in a lot of cases we won’t know, the citation just doesn’t tell us enough information to get a sense of when this vessel sailed and how it might be similar to or different from a different vessel. But for the ones that matter, so for for Enoch train this I can see we can clearly, we can put in create in some Links there for records for other ones and you can also record changes in the names for ships as well.

2 (34m 38s):
And so if you do look at Enoch train in ship index, you see well wait, there’s a ship CSS Manassas. Well it turns out that the Enoch train was a river tobo that was converted into the Confederate gunboat Manassas. And that’s not immediately obvious. And so we have connected some of these Enoch train entries into this, to this one about the the Manassas. And so that brings these together as well. It’s a complicated, and as I said, a bit tedious project to keep connecting these, but it makes it easier for people to differentiate between vessels that have the same name.

Diana (35m 16s):
Very interesting. Well I was noticing in my family tree, my very earliest ancestor Thomas Roon came over in the 16 hundreds and actually does have the name of a ship. So it says it’s 1635 and these names are to be transported to Virginia embarked in the Elizabeth Delo, Christopher Brown. So of course looking up Elizabeth, there’s like a lot of ships named Elizabeth. So that might be one that that would take some work to find if it, if there was even anything written beyond that because that is so early. But I love that there is something that we can do to try to differentiate between these vessels of the same name.

Diana (35m 58s):
Yeah, that’s neat.

2 (35m 59s):
I think Elizabeth might be the second, have the second largest number of citations in the database. So yeah, that’s

Diana (36m 6s):
Kind of could have been cuz of that queen,

2 (36m 10s):
But then you can actually, you can also look and see very clearly say there’s a schooner noted in the directory of 1869. Well that’s clearly not the vessel that parents Exactly. So you just move along to, or you know, tugboats from 19th or 20th century. That’s not the one you want, but others might be right

Diana (36m 28s):
All. right. Well

Nicole (36m 29s):
Peter, what ideas do you have for the future as regarding chip index and other ideas?

2 (36m 34s):
The thing that I’m try, I’ve been trying for years actually, is to figure out a way of identifying vessels that are in large sets of unindexed data. So far I’ve always been using indexes to books or journals or essentially, you know, a webpage as kind of like, it can be, the information be can be collected as an index, but imagine all of the vessels that are mentioned in newspapers. There’s so many, so many in there and I’ve been trying, I’ve, I’m on probably project number four or so of trying to find a way of identifying those all the ships that are in there.

2 (37m 15s):
I mean if you know what ship you’re looking for, well it makes sense to go to a newspaper resource like newspapers.com saying and and to search for that ship name in that database. But I’m am trying to put together an index for people who don’t know where to start searching I guess. So I’d love to find a way to locate all of those. And what I’m doing right now is I’m working with some entrepreneurs who are using AI chat G P T to try to identify vessels and it is turning out to be pretty challenging. Oh you know, if you see Cleveland, are you talking about the city in the US or the city in in the uk or even if you’re in the US or in Ohio or in Tennessee or or where, or are you talking about the president or you’re talking about a ship with that name.

2 (37m 58s):
And so trying to teach a computer how to figure those out and then identify all the ships in that large set of data is a real challenge. And that is the area where I feel like if I could make it work, we could unlock enormous amounts of really useful, valuable information for folks. Imagine if you had this list of all of the vessels that are mentioned in, you know, the entire run of a particular newspaper, given how many newspapers there are, it could be hugely valuable for researchers. So that’s something that I’ve been working on many different ways and my hope was that this new AI and chat G P T would would make that work.

2 (38m 43s):
We’ll see the jury’s still out on that I’m afraid.

Nicole (38m 46s):
Wow. I hope that it does help and it would be wonderful to have access to more, like you said, unindexed collections that mentioned ships like newspapers and things.

2 (38m 55s):
Yeah,

Diana (38m 55s):
I agree.

2 (38m 56s):
Another area that I would highlight is that similar but separate. One thing that I’ve been working on recently on the Ship Index webpage is research help videos and a more comprehensive guide to doing maritime history research. So actually saying even though this content isn’t yet in ship indexing, hey here are some newspaper collections that you should try to search and if you don’t have access to them, here are some ways to find out how you can get access to them. And then once you do have access to them, here’s some ways to search for, say ships named Elizabeth where you’re trying to find vessels not people and provide some of my library skills to go with my maritime history background and make it easier for people to do that maritime history research.

Diana (39m 46s):
I think that’s wonderful. and I’m just looking at ship Shipindex dot org where you’ve got the research help section where you will start putting in some of these things because whenever we go to a new website we are always kind of wondering how best to use this. And especially this is kind of a new avenue of research for, for genealogists. So I think that will be really valuable. So Thank you Yeah,

2 (40m 10s):
Thank you. Yeah, I, I’m trying to figure out exactly how best to, to build this. It’s something I’m working on, I suppose. I’m always open to people’s ideas about better ways of making it work and you know, folks can contact me at comments at Shipindex dot org. Always happy to, to hear from listeners.

Diana (40m 29s):
That’s great. Well our show notes for this episode will have contact information for you and a link to your website and it’s such a catchy name. I mean who can forget that Ship index.org. That’s pretty easy to remember. So that’ll be great. Well thanks so much Peter for coming on and talking all about Shipindex dot org and maritime history and how we can use that to further our research. It’s been such a pleasure. Good luck with everything that you’re doing,

2 (40m 56s):
Thank you, I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks for your time.

Diana (40m 58s):
You’re welcome. Well, we hope everyone has a good week and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-Bye.

Nicole (41m 4s):
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