Registration of conscripts to the navy before 1860

Before 1860 there were no organised/systematic registration of seafarers in Norway. What exists are the so-called sjøsesjonsrullene or sjølegdsrullene, translated to English as “The sea boarding rolls”. These are lists of people who were service proficient, and that could be called in for military service at sea. The people in the rolls were not necessarily seafarers but could just as easily be fishermen used to being out at sea or similar. Information regarding enrolment of service proficient people to the navy can be found in both civilian and military archives at the State Archives, Statsarkivene and Riksarkivet.

The ship “Songdal” asiling on rough waves near Cape Horn. The picture was taken by an American sailor onboard in 1912-1913. The private archive of Hartvig Dannevig. The State Archive in Kristiansand, Dep. number 508, box 19.

Prisoner registries

In 1807, Denmark-Norway was on Napoleon’s side in the war against England. English battleships overtook all the Danish and Norwegian ships they crossed paths with. The crews were put in English prisons. In total, 5000 Norwegians ended up in prison. In the English Admiralty archive in the National Archives you can find protocols with notes of these prisoners of war. Most of this information is available in the database “Norske prisonfanger 1807-14” that is found at Digitalarkivet.

Registration of seafarers in the time period 1860-1948

In 1859 the country was divided into 6 recruitment districs, and each district was divided into several smaller circuits. From 1860 all seafarers participating in sailing outside the national borders was written into seafaring rolls. When the naval enrolment was abandoned from 1911, the recruitment enforcement organisation was still kept operating as a civilian organisation in order to keep an overview of the seafarers in the merchant marine.

Boys at sea for the first time was recorded in the “annotasjonsrullen” (the annotation scroll). When they had been at sea on routes abroad for 12 months after turning 15, they were considered “half-experienced” and transferred to the main scroll. There are alphabetically ordered tables of content for the scrolls.

If a sailor got an education and became a quartermaster or a captain, he was awarded a quartermaster-patent (styrmannspatent) or a capain- certificate (skippersertifikat) There was a different certificate for machinists. When a sailor acquired such a patent or certificate, it would be noted in the main scroll.

In the scroll it is noted the ships the sailor had sailed on, in addition to when he went onboard, and when he was on leave. It would also be noted what kind of position he had had onboard. Because of this, the seafaring scrolls can give us an idea of each sailor’s travelling history.

The seafaring scrolls are found in the archives of sea-enrolments and the assembly leaders in the state archives. The scrolls are scanned, and are available at the digital archive (Digitalarkivet). All scrolls that were finished before 1930 are freelt available online. In some instances regarding newer scrolls, they are also available, when it has been checked that they do not contain sensitive information. Until all newer scrolls have been checked for sensitive information and published online, the archive (Arkivverket) will at request send links to information found in the blocked material.

The registers of the sailor scrolls for Stavanger in the time period 1860-1900 and Tromsø in the time period 1868-1899 are also transcribed, and you can search for and in them at The Digital Archive (Digitalarkivet). This way, you can search for the names of specific sailors in this area.

Partial picture of a main scroll from the recruitment area of Mandal, the state archive in Kristiansand (statsarkivet I Kristiansand). The sailor Peder Tobiassen, born 1860, sailed for almost 40 years on 28 different ships before he died in September 1918

Websites and Encyclopaedias

The website sjøhistorie.no bases its information on the sailor scrolls. On the site, information about around 21,000 Norwegian sailors and 18,000 ships are registered. It is the sailor association in Lillesand that has created the database, and therefore the largest number of sailors, around 8,700, that have been registered are from Aust-Agder, but there is also a considerable number of sailors registered from other counties: 2,400 from Vestfold, 1,600 from Hordaland and 1,400 from Vest-Agder. On the website you can find, among other things, the travel history of the sailors, which shipping companies different ships worked for, photographs of sailor an ships, sea declarations and so on.

The books  «Norges skibsførere: 1933-1935» and «Norges skipsførere: 1935-1953» are good encyclopaedias. The books contain photographs and short biographies of the specific ship captains. The second book can be read in its entirety at the websites of the National Library (Nasjonalbiblioteket).

When researching in the seafaring scrolls, the names of ships are often difficult to read. The Norwegian Veritas’s “Klasseregister over norske skibe” (Class registry of Norwegian ships) which was published annually from 1865 and onwards, can be very helpful in finding the names. In the registry you can find the name of the captain, the name of the ship, the ship’s home port, and the shipping company’s name. Before 1865, you can find Norwegian ships in “Lloyd’s Register of Shipping”.

In the earlier newspapers  «Norges sjøfartstidende» and «Kysten», which were put together in 1912 into «Norges Handels- og Sjøfartstidende», you can find a lot of information about sailors and ships. The National Library (Nasjonalbiblioteket) have digitalised both these and several other older newspapers so that all words are searchable. Some newspapers are available for everybody online, others are only available through the library’s newspaper service.

Sea travel books from Kristiansand seafaring office for the time period 1900-1965. On the right we can also see an example of the so-called travel proof documents and staffing lists.

The Second World War

The website Krigsseilerregisteret (The wartime sailor registry), which is administered by The Association The Archive in Kristiansand (Stiftelsen Arkivet i Kristiansand), have registered information on more than 14,000 wartime sailors and nearly 3500 ships. The information builds on, among other things, the Ex gratia-archive (Ex-gratia-akrivet) which is situated in the archive of the kingdom (Riksarkivet). This encompasses all those who appealed for reparations in relation to the Nortraship-case, which would include most Norwegian sailors that sailed outside of Norway’s naval borders during the second world war. 23,000 wartime sailors were awarded reparations.

The Seafarer Offices 1948-1989

From 1948 and onwards seafarer offices were opened in 16 Norwegian coastal cities. In each office they made sure to log the recruitment of sailors in a card-registry of sailors. The cards were ordered by birthdays in increasing order. The cards are today kept at the state archives, but are not freely available to the public as they can contain sensitive information. It is still possible to get information on a specific sailor at request.

The registry cards encompasses sailors born in the time period ca. 1875-1970, and contains the same kind of information as the earlier scrolls. Some of the registry cards even have a picture of the sailor the card is on. The seafarer offices were closed down in 1989, and their tasks were taken over by the employment offices (arbeidskontorene)

An example of a registry card

Copies of the registry cards were sent to The Sentral Registry of Sailors (Sentralregisteret for sjømenn), which from 1962 was placed under the Department of Sailors. The archive of this is today located at the archive of the kingdom (riksarkivet).

Here is a small, step-by-step guide to how to search in the registry cards

Her er en liten trinnvis veiledning til hvordan du kan søke i registerkortene.  (Norwegian)

Shipping company archives

Archiving institutions and museums have through the years collected archives from numerous Norwegian shipping companies. Many shipping company archives are registered on the website Arkivportalen (The archive portal). When searching there you can find the archive catalogue, and using it you can find what each of the shipping company archives contain. Many shipping company archives will in addition be organised into the different ships. Here you can, for example, find staffing lists and an overview of the hire payments for the sailors that were on the ship.

This is how you search in the Archive Portal

Slik søker du på Arkivportalen. (Norwegian)

Another important part of the single shipping company archives would be the deck diaries (dekksdagbøkene). They tell us in short about the ship’s speed. In the deck diaries the placement/position and heading of the ship would be noted down, and then all happenings that could be of interest to the shipping company, the government, the owners of the shipments, the insurance companies etc. would be recorded. Here you can expect to find information on loading and offloading, but also notes on the crew’s embarkment and disembarkation, illnesses, attempts at escape and similar.

In the ships’ correspondence archives you can find more complete accounts of the live onboard the ships, and we can often find information on specific sailors there. The captains of the ships regularly sent letters or telegrams to the owner of the shipping company, and in them you can find detailed information on shipments and travels, crews, helath of the crews, accidents and injuries, provisions and more.

In most shipping company archives there will also be photographs. Especially ships are taken pictures of, but you can also be lucky and find pictures of the crews where the sailor you are looking for is pictured

Photo: Archive material from the ship M/T «G. C. Brøvig». A photo album from the launch of the ship in 1930, the captains letter that was sent from Estero Bay in Florida Aug. 10th 1937, the deck diary of the years 1935-36 and the book recording the payment of the crew from 1938.

Accounts of ships sinking and accidents at sea

If a ship sunk  / was wrecked or was a part of an accident, an account of this was often recorded in the district court judge district (sorenskriverdistrikted) the accident happened in. However, in quite a few incidents the accounts were taken in the closest larger city or in the court district where the ship had its home port.

Before 1927 we find the accounts of happenings at sea in the so called “extra-court protocols” (ekstrarettsprotokollene)  or in their own sea court protocols (sjørettsprotokoller). These are found in district court judge- or city court archives that are kept at the state archives. After 1927 we have to look for the accounts in the court case lists for civil matters, and after that you must find the actual court documents with witness accounts and so on.

In the accounts witnesses recount the timeline of the accident, but we also get to know a lot about the speed of the ship and the sailors onboard. Everyone that was a part of the crew would be questioned, and in addition the staffing lists from the ship are usually attached.

The accounts should be given at the nearest consulate if a Norwegian ship sunk or was wrecked abroad. The archives from the Norwegian stations abroad (utenriksstasjonene) and the consulates are kept at the archive of the kingdom (Riksarkivet). Especially the archives from the stations abroad in the USA and the UK might have accounts from Norwegian ships.

All 900 sea declarations from the first world war are printed in the five-volume work “Sjøforklaringer over norske skibes krigsforlis”. In the two-volume work “sjøforklaringer fra 2.verdenskrig (1940-1945)” published in 2003, around 500 wartime shipwreks from “Nortrashipsflåten” (the Nortra ship fleet) are described.

Sources:

• Arkivmagasinet, nr. 3/1990. Informasjon frå Riksarkivet.
• Digitalarkivet.no
• Digitale aviser i lokale bibliotek. Hentet fra: https://www.nb.no/Tilbud/Samlingen/Samlingen/Aviser/Digitale-aviser-i-lokale-bibliotek
• Dokumentene forteller. Statsarkivet i Kristiansand. Riksarkivarens skriftserie 17.
• Johannesen, Knut (red). (1992). Håndbok for Riksarkivet. Otta: Ad Notam Gyldendal.
• Kilder til krigsseilerregisteret. Hentet fra: https://www.krigsseilerregisteret.no/no/artikkel/kilder-til-krigsseilerregisteret
• Lian, Oddleif (2003). Norske prisonfanger – ei orientering. Hentet fra: http://digitalarkivet.uib.no/DaDoc/fa22001807.htm
• Mykland, Liv (2010). Håndbok for brukere av statsarkivene. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
• Sjøhistorie.no
• Stoa, Nils Johan og Sandberg, Lars Jørgen (2012). Våre røtter. Slektsgransking som hobby. Oslo: Cappelen-Damm.

(Written by Thomas Olsen/Statsarkivet i Kristiansand. Found at Slekt og Data 1/2017)