I have already had occasion to mention my mother’s online historical project warsailors.com but I wanted to write a short post to congratulate her on the completion of a remarkable achievement.
My mother’s ship lists contains detailed information on hundreds of Norwegian merchant marine vessels from World War II that played a key role in supplying the allies in Britain and elsewhere during the war. She also contains information on many of the ships in the home fleet under German control.
In addition to reference information about the ships such as the years they were built, tonnage, and their fate during or after the war, she has assembled an incredible collection of anecdotes, crew lists, prisoner of war information, and other valuable information about the ships that are useful not only to historians but also the thousands of descendants of sailors who served and in many cases died on these ships.
The primary task she has dedicated herself over the past months is to organize, process, and upload thousands of images of voyage lists of these vessels taken from the Norwegian national archives and post the images as links from the various ships where they can be viewed directly and compared to similar voyage records compiled and already available online by an Arnold Hague for fact checking purposes.
I have picked a ship completely at random, M/T Dageid, which shows you the kind of pages that have grown out of her years of work. I’m sure she has other ship entries that she is particularly proud of, but this random entry is already impressive. The ships now contain up to a dozen or so links to pages of the voyage records so, for example, descendants can determine where their merchant marine, or at least his ship, was at a given time during the war.
Although the links to these images are small and may go unnoticed, they represent many hundreds of hours of work by my mother. She now returns to her previous task of meticulously assembling and organizing information about the hundreds of convoys these ships sailed in. You can see her considerable progress so far on her convoys page.