For anyone researching a particular ship,  ShipIndex.org could prove invaluable.   It offers a searchable database with 143,935 entries in the free database and 1,349,574 entries available with premium access. Having done a bit of searching, it looks both easy and powerful.

ShipIndex.org

If you’re a historian, a modelmaker, a genealogist, a fact-checker, or anyone else who needs information about vessels, we’ll get you where you need to go, and fast.

We have over 140,000 entries that are freely accessible, without subscribing or logging in anywhere. For $9.95 per month, you’ll soon have access to well over a million additional citations, from hundreds of different resources – books, magazines, CD-ROMs, websites, online databases, and more. Not only would it take hundreds of hours to search every resource here by hand, it’s simply not possible: no single library has all of the resources included in this database. The time you’ll save, searching hundreds of resources in just a few moments, is well worth the cost of two coffees and muffins. Subscriptions run monthly, and there’s no minimum signup period.

ShipIndex.org is best for vessels that aren’t particularly famous. Sure, you’ll find dozens or hundreds of entries for Titanic or Lusitania, but the best use of ShipIndex.org is for finding out about vessels that are mentioned in just one or two resources. It might take you years of traveling to research libraries and searching through their holdings to find these references. Well, until ShipIndex.org, that is.

Professional and occasional genealogists will find fantastic uses for the site when trying to learn more about a specific vessel on which an individual traveled, served, or worked. And since there’s no central index, resource, or database that focuses on maritime history, academics will find this site invaluable in locating information about obscure vessels.