Marine and fishing ancestors: between land and sea

Discover how to find your marine and fishing ancestors thanks to crew lists, ship registers and maritime archives.

©Gallica - BnF

Marine and fishing ancestors marine and fishing ancestors leave abundant traces in the archives, but still too little used: crew lists, ship registers, navigation registers and maritime district archives still allow you to follow their life between land and sea with rare precision. 

By relying on these records and a structuring tool like Geneafinder, you can turn a simple mention of “sailor” or “fisherman” into a well-documented maritime biography.

Ancestors who were mariners and fishermen: between land and sea

Mariners and fishermen include all those who work at sea on fishing or commercial vessels, whether they are sailors, fishing boat captains, shipwrights, caulkers, or petty officers. Their lives are marked by navigation campaigns, successive embarkations, distant ports of call, as well as a strong presence on land during disarmament periods, marriages, and births.

In France, maritime fishing employs around 12,400 mariners and fishermen today, with a turnover of €1.2 billion in 2020, showing the lasting importance of this sector in coastal economies. This contemporary dynamic continues a long history structured since Colbert by the maritime registration, a system of mandatory registration for civilian sailors that generated thousands of registers useful for genealogists.

📄 Understanding maritime registration: the key to your research

What is maritime registration?

To find a fisherman, you first need to understand how maritime registration works, which is the backbone of maritime archives from the Old Regime to the present day.

Maritime registration is an administrative system created under Colbert that requires all seafarers (commercial sailors, fishing sailors, shipwrights, caulkers, etc.) to be registered in muster rolls managed by maritime districts. It serves several purposes:

• to list sailors available for the Royal Navy, then the national navy.
• to track their embarkations, campaigns, and rights (pay, pensions, aid).

FranceArchives specifies that the maritime registration navigation registers include “all series of registers necessary for recording commercial and fishing vessels,” with four main types: vessel muster rolls, crew lists, armament/disarmament registers, and ship entry/exit registers. 

In practice, if your ancestor lived by the sea and was a « sailor », « fisherman » or « seaman », you almost always have a chance to find them in a maritime registration record, provided you identify their maritime district.

Understanding maritime registration gives you access to the administrative system that frames and documents almost all French fishing sailors since the 17th century.

Maritime districts and crew lists: essential definitions

Two concepts constantly appear in the archives: maritime district and crew list.

The maritime district is the territorial unit of maritime registration: each important port (Brest, Lorient, Boulogne, Dunkerque, etc.) has a district that manages sailors residing in its jurisdiction.

The crew list is the nominative list of men embarked on a ship for a given campaign; it includes their names, first names, ranks (seaman, shipboy, master), sometimes age, place of birth, and function on board.

Identifying your ancestor's maritime district and ship provides direct access to dozens of campaigns, each documented by a crew list, allowing you to track their voyages, promotions, and sometimes the circumstances of their death step by step.

🛶 Where to look for a maritime fishermen ancestor?

Start on Land: Civil and Census Records

Research for a sailor always starts on land, in the "classic" sources.

1. Systematically note the mentions of occupation in civil and parish records (births, marriages, deaths). A man may be listed as a "sailor," "seaman," "fisherman," "fishing boat captain," or "registered sailor" at different times.
   
   
2. Consult the population censuses  of the 19th⁰ century, which often indicate the profession and residence of the sailor, helping to identify the relevant maritime district.

Entering both the profession and residence for each suspected sailor ancestor in Geneafinder helps quickly identify your family's "coastal" branches and then target the right maritime districts in the archive inventories.

Identify the Registration District and the Right Archives

Without a registration district, you risk getting lost in maritime records.

From the place of residence or birth, identify the maritime district that the town belongs to (e.g., Paimpol is under the Paimpol district, some towns in the Pays Bigouden under the Quimper district, etc.).

Then consult the maritime archive guides, particularly those from FranceArchives and the Historical Service of the Defense (SHD), which detail the distribution of maritime registries among different archives (SHD, departmental archives, sometimes municipal archives).

Once the district is identified, you can create a precise research plan in Geneafinder (using the Task Manager): series and sub-series to consult, registry numbers, chronology, with the ability to mark the searched registers as you go.

Crew Lists and Ship Registers: The Core Records

Sailors' Registers and Crew Lists are the two central sources for tracing a maritime fishermen's career.

The sailors' registers group individual files for registered sailors: identity, civil status, physical description, rank, successive voyages, injuries, decorations, pensions, etc.

The crew lists, by ship, list all the men on board for a given voyage, with their roles, embarkation date, destination, and often the disembarkation date.

For each identified maritime fishermen ancestor, record all their voyages in Geneafinder in the Activity field to visualize their experience, fishing or navigation areas, promotions, and sometimes the reasons for their disappearance (shipwreck, illness at sea).

🚢 Practical Research Tips for Fishermen Sailors

Cross-referencing Maritime Archives and 'Land-Based' Sources

The lives of fishermen sailors can be read both at sea and on land; therefore, you must systematically cross-reference the sources

1. On land, use: civil records, parish registers, censuses, succession registers, notary archives (marriage contracts, post-mortem inventories), which reveal family situations (widowhoods, orphans, remarriages after disappearance at sea).
   
   
2. At sea, use: muster rolls, crew lists, navigation registers and captain's sea reports, which document accidents, shipwrecks, desertions, or illnesses.

By recording everything in Geneafinder (embarkation dates, absences from home, deaths at sea, remarriages on land), you reconstruct family trajectories often marked by the risks of the trade (early widowhoods, 'natural' children, coastal migrations).

Exploiting Maritime Registers and Indexes

The online databases and associative indexes offer considerable time savings to identify a sailor.

Some associations, like the GAMT or maritime genealogy circles, publish indexes of maritime registrants, sometimes for thousands of records, with the possibility of requesting a detailed copy. The GAMT explains that 'a maritime registrant may have several files' depending on his embarkations, rank changes, or relocations, and that it provides indexes made directly at the Maritime Affairs service.

Genealogical sites (Filae, Geneanet, etc.) offer indexes or collections dedicated to sailors, particularly from digitized muster rolls or crew lists.

By using these databases as an entry point, then verifying each record on the digitized archives, you consolidate your data while saving precious time.

Focus Brittany, Manche, Atlantic: Well-Documented Coasts

Some coastal regions benefit from particularly rich and structured maritime documentation.

Major ports in Brittany (Brest, Lorient, Saint-Malo), the Atlantic (La Rochelle, Bordeaux), and the English Channel (Boulogne, Dunkerque, Dieppe) possess voluminous maritime registration and navigation records, often largely digitized.

If your ancestors come from Brittany, Normandy, or Charente-Maritime, you have a good chance of having a continuum of detailed maritime archives: Geneafinder will then be precious to manage your sources and avoid getting lost in successive campaigns.

 ️ FAQ – Maritime fisherman ancestors

1. How can I know if my ancestor was registered as maritime?

Any professional sailor (commerce or fishing) living on the coast should, in principle, be registered as maritime. The mention “registered as maritime” or “sailor” in the civil status, associated with a residence in a port or coastal town, is a very strong indicator.

2. Where can I find the muster rolls of fisherman sailors?

They are located in the maritime registration funds, preserved either at the Historical Service of Defense, or in the departmental archives according to the districts. The inventories of FranceArchives and the guides of the SHD indicate the precise distribution of the registers by district.

3. What can I learn about a sailor from his muster roll number?

A muster roll card indicates the full identity, description, embarkation dates, ships, promotions, sometimes decorations, injuries or pensions. It allows you to reconstruct the maritime career over several decades.

4. Do crew lists also cover coastal fishermen?

Yes, crew lists cover both fishing and commercial ships. For small local units, the documentation may be less complete, but crew lists remain a major source for fisherman sailors.

5. How can Geneafinder help me with my maritime ancestors?

In its records and source notes spaces, Geneafinder helps you centralize embarkation dates, places of residence, muster roll references, and crew lists, and link this information to family events (marriages, births, deaths).

6. What if I don’t know the maritime district of my ancestor?

Start with the place of residence or birth indicated in the civil status and consult the district/commune correspondence tables in the SHD and FranceArchives guides. Failing that, try the districts of the nearest large ports.

7. Can I find a shipwreck or death at sea?

Ship captains' reports, some crew lists, and ship entry/exit registers contain mentions of shipwrecks or deaths at sea. This information sometimes also appears in civil status (marginal notes, declaratory judgments of death).

⚓️ Give a voice to the marine fishermen in your family tree

Marine fishermen ancestors leave behind an exceptional documentary trail: crew lists, ship registers, navigation registers, and maritime district archives allow you to closely follow their professional lives. By cross-referencing these sources with civil records, censuses, and notarial records, then structuring everything in Geneafinder, you can restore the delicate balance between land and sea that shaped the daily lives of generations of sailors, fishermen, and their families along the French coastlines.

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