Background
TheShipsList website was a valuable source of information about shipping lines that I believe it was created and maintained by Gery and Sue Swiggum of Nova Scotia. It proved invaluable to me during early research for The Allen Collection, but is no longer available online. I presume that the Swiggums had Norwegian ancestors as Sue was also one of the founders of the 'Norway-Heritage - Hands Across the Sea' website which is still online [2]. TheShipsList was concerned with passenger vessels and there is little about cargo vessels - apart from those that carried small number of passengers.
I have been unable to contact the owners who, sadly, may be no longer with us. The website was archived and much of it can still be acccessed in a frozen form in an obscure corner of 'The Internet Archive Wayback Machine' [1] but access is slow and clunky. All credit for the research that went into these pages goes to Gery and Sue Swiggum, Ted Finch and Henk Jungerius who were the major contributors over a long period.
I have taken it upon myself to re-publish the pages about shipping companies for the benefit of other researchers and hope that the Swiggums would have approved of this. I have simplified the code on each page for ease of maintenance and reformatted it to harmonise with the rest of this website. There was far more material on the original website, including passenger lists, ship descriptions, ship rigging, ship arrivals, marriage at sea, famine emigrants and shipwrecks. I do not have time to investigate or transcribe these but anyone interested can check the version on The Internet Archive [1].
Notes:
1. These pages have been rebuilt with minimal changes and some of them were constructed many years ago so statements about ships being in service are
outdated.
2. I have not validated any of the information and the pages are provided 'As is'.
3. I have added a page HERE that explains some of the words that occur in the names of companies that are not in English.
Brian Watson
20 January 2025
What's New?
- 20 January 2025: Transcription of all Companies completed and index improved.
- 8 January 2025: Companies completed A-I
- 2 January 2025: Software tools created to assist conversion of archived pages. Companies completed A-C
- 18 December 2024: Split index pages and completion of most companies from A-B
- 10 November 2024: Initial publication as part of the Benjidog Historical Research Resources