RMS Caronia Timeline

Obtaining Caronia Crew Lists post 1958

Appeal Introduction

Among the most popular pages on the Timeline are the 70 Crew List Transcripts. It has been a long-held ambition to complete this task. Currently, apart from where the quality of the originals has prohibited, there is an almost complete set of crew lists from January 1949 up to June 1958.

What's missing is everything post June 1958 up to November 1967. I have recently become aware that Caronia Crew Lists are available from the National Archive at Kew within their “Celebrated Ships” collections. I have made an enquiry which appears to be successful.

The Current Position

Sadly, these lists remain uncatalogued, so they are not available to view without paying for the individual pages to be scanned. This is a big decision to take and the overall cost is no nominal sum.

I've been quoted £630 (GBP) for 136 sheets covering 4 voyages from August 1957 to the last date in that file: 16th October 1957. Please bear in mind that the original sheets are A3 or larger in size, which costs each scan at an average of £4.64.

In 1958 there were 5 voyages leaving Southampton, so the cost for that year will be around £780 (GBP). Below is an estimated breakdown of the overall costs to complete the job…

The Proposal

As can be seen this is no flight of fancy! Apart from raising funds, it means many, many hours of transcribing to create what will become almost 110 lists. Sadly, as a disabled UK pensioner, I'm unable to fund this entirely from my own pocket, although I will be happy to contribute as much as I can.

I will need to set up separate fundraisers over the next 11 months with amounts corresponding to those shown above. I've been given until 23 December 2024 to proceed with the initial order. I'm hoping that I can do this through the PayPal Donations scheme, though I have yet to explore what their limitations and costs are.

Fundraising

My initial thoughts are to ask everyone who lands upon a crew list page to donate £2 (GBP) or $4 (USD) for every entry they find here to go toward completion of the exercise. After all most Merchant Seamen were, by their very nature, itinerant folk and could well have returned to Caronia in later years.

Not only will the visitor have saved a great deal of time and expense in their research, they can go on to vicariously follow how their target lived, and the places they visited back then. Is that not worth a donation of some sort?

Some Questions

Obviously, there are some serious questions to ask. The first of these is the biggest: Is this idea feasible? There are also two things I want to avoid…

1. having to charge visitors a fee to view crew lists
2. theft of the entire collection by unscrupulous actors

There is much to ponder!

Let Me Know

I'll be exploring options over the next few days, so if you have any comments upon how I should proceed, do please drop me a line.