Tracing a Navy shipmate: where the records are

For years this address held a crew list kept by a ship’s reunion association: surnames typed in capitals, home streets, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, updated whenever someone wrote in. An archive has no business republishing the home address and telephone number of a living person, so the list itself is not reproduced here. What follows is the route to the same answer, and it is a sturdier route than any single page of typed names.

Why a typed roster stops working

A roster on a personal page is maintained by one volunteer. It ages the moment that volunteer stops answering mail: people move, telephone numbers are reassigned, mailboxes at defunct providers bounce. Within a few years most lines in such a list point nowhere, and the ones that still work often reach a relative rather than the shipmate. The list also travels badly. Copies get mirrored, indexed and scraped, and a veteran who agreed to be listed once for a reunion finds his street address readable by anyone forever. That is the part a volunteer cannot undo, and it is the reason these lists disappear rather than get corrected.

Where service records actually live

The durable copies are institutional, not personal. Muster rolls and deck logs are kept as government records, because they were compiled as government records at the time; they show who was aboard, and when, which is exactly what a roster was trying to reconstruct from memory. Personnel files are held separately and released under rules that protect the living: a veteran can request his own file, and next of kin can request the file of someone who has died. Reunion associations keep membership rolls too, but they keep them privately and pass on a message rather than hand out an address.

How to search without an address list

Start with the ship and the dates, not the name. A hull number plus a span of service years narrows the record set faster than a surname, and it survives misspellings, nicknames and married names. Write down the rating or rank if you know it. Then approach the holders in order: the government record office for who was aboard, the association for whether the person is still in touch, the local veterans post for the last town anyone remembers. Each of those will forward a message; none of them will publish a contact detail, and that is the correct behaviour on both sides.

Keep your own file honest

Whatever you find, keep the provenance attached: which record it came from, which page or box, and the date you read it. Family history is copied faster than it is checked, and an undated note becomes a fact in somebody else’s tree within a decade. If you build a list of your own and intend to share it, list names and ships, not addresses and telephone numbers. The people who want to be reachable can say so themselves; the people who did not choose it cannot take it back.

If the trail ends

Sometimes it does. Crews were large, records were compiled by hand, and a misread digit in a service number can hide a man for years. When that happens the useful move is to widen rather than repeat: a sister ship’s association, a division newsletter, a hometown newspaper index. The record exists somewhere in an institution that was built to keep it, which is more than can be said for any typed page that once lived at this address.