Years ago, hundreds of ships manned by hundreds seafarers carried cargo from around the world what was once the busiest port in the world. Greeting the seafarers was the Seamen’s Church Institute (SCI), a 177-year-old maritime service organization affiliated with the Episcopal Church that handled their needs while in port and at sea.
“Because of this,” said SCI Associate Archivist John Thayer, “the story of SCI is inseparable from the story of the modern seafarer, as well as the story of the development of downtown Manhattan and the Port of New Jersey.” Thayer and his team recently completed a major digitization of some 12,500 items from SCI’s archive collection, the beginning of a project to share the Institute’s collection of historic artifacts that record the development of New York and maritime commerce.
Explore this rich history of mariners by going directly to SCI’s Database. You can search with an intuitive Keyword and learn to navigate throughout the database with various hyper-links. You can also move up and down the “tree” browse exploring the multi-level structure: record group, series, sub-series, file, and item.
Learn about other holdings and finding aids in the SCI Archives from the SCI Website.
Photo: Seamen’s Church Institute
<