Records held by the National Maritime Museum covering more than 100 years of admissions to the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital have been made available online, thanks to the completion of an 18-month ‘e-volunteer’ project, involving more than 100 transcribers around the globe.
The admission registers, covering 1826-1930, have been transcribed in partnership with subscription site Ancestry.co.uk to create 220,000 new digital records featuring information on seafarers from across the world, including a large number of Indian and Asian seamen, as well as patients from other walks of life. Conditions recorded vary from injuries sustained in combat, to disease outbreaks such as beri-beri, scurvy and cholera.
The Seamen’s Hospital Society (later Seafarer’s Hospital Society) was founded in 1821 in response to the increasing number of homeless and impoverished seafarers living on the streets of London after the Napoleonic Wars. Initially, the hospital was based on a number of ships moored on the Thames off Greenwich, including HMS Dreadnought, a name which was retained when the hospital relocated to the vacant in rmary building of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich as the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital in 1870.