About the project
About the First World War Royal Navy Lives at Sea Project
The National Archives (TNA), The National Maritime Museum (NMM) and the Crew List Index Project team (CLIP) building on their successful collaboration with the Merchant 1915 Crew List Index project have joined together again with the help of a team of e-volunteers from all over the world to create a free to search database resource relating to all the Royal Navy officers and ratings that served in the First World War based principally on service records held by TNA.
Why is this project important?
This project will create the most significant online data resource for the study of the Royal Navy personnel during the First World War. This unique resource also marks and commemorates the Royal Navy’s contribution to the First World War effort through the lives of those officers and ratings who served. Our hope is that it will allow and promote a wide and diverse variety of research into the composition and operations of the Royal Navy during the War. This could be specifically in relation to individual officers and ratings through their personal and service histories, to wider studies, for instance, where men were recruited from, from which trades and to enable the creation of crew lists for ships and submarines for given dates. Such lists do not survive for the First World War and so for the first time researchers will be able to place officers and ratings in naval battles of the War and study topics such as mortality rates, and causes of invalidity. In addition the information derived from the database can be used as a platform for accessing other Royal Navy records including ships’ logs (ADM 53), ships’ photographs (ADM 176) and wider naval First World War operational records in (ADM 1, ADM 116, ADM 137) all at TNA, and First World War logs and journals (JOD), ship plans (SP) and photographs (HP) all at NMM.
About the database what information is being captured
The aim is to capture personal and service details for every officer and rating who served in the First World War including:
- Name
- Date of Birth
- Next of Kin
- Service Number
- Town/City of birth
- County of birth
- Country of birth
- Occupation
- Name of every ship/submarine/shore establishment served in (including from and to dates)
- Rank or rating held on every ship/submarine/shore establishment served in
- Which battle served in during the First World War, for example, (Heligoland Bight, Coronel, Falkland Islands 1914; Dogger Bank 1915; Jutland 1916; Otranto Straits, 1917).
- Cause and date of discharge (for example, with regards to death, invalidity demobilisation).
- Where buried or commemorated.
- Medals awarded.
For some officers and ratings there may be more than one service record, sometimes with overlapping, duplicate and conflicting data. In such instances recourse will be made to published works, such as the Navy List, to verify information.
