Visit our booth at the National Genealogical Society 2010 Family History Conference in Salt Lake City, April 28 - May 1. Also, come see us at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington D.C. June 24-29!

If you're looking for information about a specific vessel, you're in the right place! Log in here if you already have an account.

If you're a historian, a modelmaker, a genealogist, a fact-checker, or anyone else who needs information about vessels, we'll get you where you need to go, and fast.

We have over 140,000 entries that are freely accessible, without subscribing or logging in anywhere. For under $10 per month, you'll soon have access to nearly one and a quarter million additional citations, from hundreds of different resources – books, magazines, CD-ROMs, websites, online databases, and more. Not only would it take hundreds of hours to search every resource here by hand, it’s simply not possible: no single library has all of the resources included in this database. The time you’ll save, searching hundreds of resources in just a few moments, is well worth the cost of two coffees and muffins. Subscriptions run monthly, and there’s no minimum signup period.

ShipIndex.org is best for vessels that aren't particularly famous. Sure, you'll find dozens or hundreds of entries for Titanic or Lusitania, but the best use of ShipIndex.org is for finding out about vessels that are mentioned in just one or two resources. It might take you years of traveling to research libraries and searching through their holdings to find these references. Well, until ShipIndex.org, that is.

Professional and occasional genealogists will find fantastic uses for the site when trying to learn more about a specific vessel on which an individual traveled, served, or worked. And since there's no central index, resource, or database that focuses on maritime history, academics will find this site invaluable in locating information about obscure vessels.

The content in ShipIndex.org includes books on whaling, warfare, fishing, immigration, trade, disasters, slavery, and much, much more. Right now, all content is from English-language books -- though vessels from all parts of the world are represented -- but that will change over time.

Contents in the database include Fairburn's six-volume Merchant Sail, WA Baker's Maritime History of Bath, Maine, Starbuck's History of the American Whale Fishery (as well as Hegarty's addendum to Starbuck), Newell's H.W. McCurdy's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, and multiple works from Basil Lubbock, Howard Chapelle, Robert Albion, Carl Cutler, Lincoln Paine, and many more. Content from journals like American Neptune and Sea Chest is included, and content from Mariner's Mirror, Nautical Research Journal, and more, will soon follow. See the complete list here.

In most cases, information regarding illustrations, main entries, or other notations in the original index are included here. Click on the link for the resource title, on the results page, to learn more about the citations.

Give it a try; we hope it's helpful!

To keep abreast of ShipIndex.org's related goings-on, please visit the contact us page and submit your email address. Also, please grace us with an 'add' on Twitter or Facebook.