What Is a Discharge Book?

First checks before you go further

A discharge book is the seaman's personal record of voyages, ships, ratings and conduct, carried from ship to ship. It is the spine of merchant research, in the same way a service record is the spine of forces research.

A good first session ends with a short list of dated facts and a longer list of questions, not with a finished story. What you do not know matters as much as what you know, because a search built on an assumed date or an assumed unit will miss the right record. If a search starves you of results, drop one filter, not all of them. Dropping everything at once teaches you nothing about which filter was wrong.

Making sense of what you find

Do not carry a final rank, a final trade, or a final unit backwards through a career. Every entry belongs to its own date, and the career is the sequence, not the endpoint. A single sheet can contain several dates: the date of the event, the date of writing, and the date of filing. Keep them separate in your notes.

If an entry puzzles you, date it first and interpret it second. Most misreadings here come from carrying a later meaning backwards. A term that appears only once in a file deserves more care, not less: a single unusual entry is often the clue that explains a transfer or a change of role.

Dead ends to expect here

Where a record set is arranged by unit rather than by surname, a surname search alone will miss it. Mirror the catalogue structure, and the record set opens up. The quietest dead end is a record you never open because a search snippet looked irrelevant. Open the catalogue description, not just the snippet, before you dismiss it.

• A gap between voyages recorded elsewhere.
• A ship loss that scattered the surviving paper.
• A merchant record filed apart from a Royal Navy record.
• A common name with no discharge number to separate two men.

Working through it in order

Write down the step you are on, in plain words, before you take it. A step you cannot state plainly is a step you do not yet understand. Where two steps could come in either order, choose the one whose record is more reliable, and let the reliable record frame the less reliable one.

• Fix the seaman identity details, name and any discharge number, before opening ship records.
• Use the discharge book to list ships and voyages in date order.
• Open the crew agreement for each ship and voyage, and note its reference.
• Test every ship movement against the discharge book before adding it to the timeline.

The next record in the chain

From here, the productive move is usually sideways, into a different record set for the same dates, rather than forwards into the next date. Work the chain one link at a time. A timeline built link by link can be checked; a timeline built by jumping to the most interesting record cannot.

Where the next step involves a different holder, take the reference with you. A holder approached without a reference can only offer general guidance. A conclusion earned link by link is worth more than a story assembled at speed. Take the slower route, and keep the references.