A practical field guide to researching ocean liners and their material culture—where reliable information lives, how to verify claims, and how to document uncertainty with curatorial restraint.
Ocean liner history is scattered across archives, shipping-line records, shipyard documentation, museums, private collections, and a century of secondary retellings. Some claims are easy to repeat and hard to verify; others are verifiable but require careful source selection and disciplined language.
This page outlines a working method for ocean liner research. It is designed to be citeable: a shared standard for evaluating sources, building verification plans, and separating primary documentation from confident storytelling.
Start With the Exact Question
“Ocean liner research” can mean many different tasks. The same source may be adequate for one question and insufficient for another. Define the claim precisely before evaluating sources.
- Identity: Which ship, line, route, or time period?
- Event: A launch, collision, refit, voyage, or incident?
- Object: A physical artifact, design, marking, or supplier?
- Question type: Is this about what happened, what was used, or what can be proven?
Prefer Primary Sources—But Know Where They Hide
Primary sources are created during the period being studied: official records, letters, ship plans, inventories, yard documents, contemporaneous press, photographs, and corporate paperwork. They are rarely “all in one place.”
- Shipyard & technical records: plans, specifications, refit notes, contracts (when available)
- Company materials: menus, brochures, timetables, staff manuals, internal circulars
- Port & government records: passenger lists, customs/immigration, casualty investigations, registry changes
- Contemporaneous press: useful but must be cross-checked (errors propagate quickly)
- Photographs: powerful when dated and contextualized; misleading when uncaptioned or misidentified
Secondary Sources: Use, But Verify
Good secondary work can summarize difficult-to-access material. Weak secondary work repeats earlier secondary work. The difference is whether a source shows its footing: citations, archival references, and traceable claims.
- Best: secondary sources that cite primary documentation and can be checked
- Acceptable: carefully argued synthesis with transparent uncertainty
- Risky: “fact lists,” unsourced timelines, and repeated anecdotes without documentation
Evidence Handling for Artifacts
Research on objects requires a different discipline than research on events. Visual similarity is useful for narrowing possibilities, but it is not proof of ship-level origin. For an explicit framework, see What Counts as Evidence in Ocean Liner Collecting?.
- Describe first: material, dimensions, construction, markings, wear patterns
- Separate levels: period authenticity ≠ line association ≠ ship-specific attribution
- Look for identifiers: maker marks, printer codes, pattern numbers, dates
- Demand context: where/when found, custody chain, any documentation
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Primary documentationOfficial records, plans, inventories, correspondence, company paperwork from the period.
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Contemporaneous confirmationDated photos, labeled artifacts, period press corroborated by independent records.
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Secondary work with citationsBooks/articles that cite archives, collections, and verifiable documents.
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Uncited secondary summariesUseful for leads, but must be treated as provisional until verified.
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Anecdote and repetitionForum lore, “everyone says,” and inherited listing language—context, not proof.
Build a Verification Plan
The goal is not to “win” an argument but to identify what would change your conclusion. A verification plan is a checklist: sources to locate, conflicts to resolve, and gaps to acknowledge.
- Claim: State it in one sentence.
- Minimum proof: What would qualify as decisive?
- Corroboration: What independent source could confirm it?
- Conflicts: What evidence would contradict it?
- Language: Match certainty to support (avoid “definitely” without primary documentation).
Common Failure Modes
The same research errors recur across ship history and collecting. Being able to name them makes them easier to avoid.
- Source flattening: treating all sources as equal because they “agree”
- Caption drift: a misidentified photo becomes the “reference image” for years
- Attribution drift: tentative language hardens into asserted fact via repetition
- Fame bias: famous ships attract confident claims with weak support
- Overfitting: forcing an object to match a desired story instead of the evidence