Categories for immigrant ships? [closed]

Question

So I actually managed to track down one of my ancestral families to the passenger list of the ship they arrived on. I have been able to find pictures of the ship, and descriptions of its length, engines, passenger capacity, who owned it, who built it, and whatnot. (One site even has a list of trips it made, with departure and arrival ports and dates.) It seems to me wasteful to put that onto a single profile, and then have to duplicate it to others, when it could be a category, and all the information about the ship itself could be in one place, and then the profile of anybody who was a passenger (or crew member, I suppose) on it could be linked to the category, and thus all the information.

But I must be looking in the wrong place. I see categories for ships used in the Great Migration, and for carrying passengers to Australia, but not for ships which carried passengers to Canada. Is it just a matter of nobody's bothered to create those categories yet, or was there a deliberate decision not to?

Greg

 

Comments

IF you set up a free space page for this particular ship/voyage PLEASE make sure that you link it to the appropriate categories so that everyone can benefit from this great research that you have done....the free space pages so often get lost without this.  ALSO, I and others have started to provide resource links for specific locations on the related category pages which will help all of us when we find a connection/s to that location so also please add links there as well.  :)

---

Actually, what I ended up doing was this:

The sailing: SS Polynesian, sailed April 20, 1882 is where my ancestors' profiles point to, because that's the particular sailing they were on.

Above that, I created a category called S.S. Polynesian, so that people working on profiles of people who were on a different sailing can link to there, too, and possibly that category will end up having all of the Polynesian's sailings listed under it.

The S.S. Polynesian category is now a subcategory of the 1870s Ships category, since the Polynesian was launched in 1872. But the S.S. Polynesian category also points to the S.S. Polynesian free space page, which has all the details I collected on the ship itself. (Apparently maritime history is a popular hobby all on its own, because digging up the details on the ship was pretty easy.)

I was tempted to put the details about the ship into the S.S. Polynesian category page, rather than having a separate free space page, but I couldn't see any way to add the photo (engraving, actually) to the category.

Greg

Answer 1

Thank you all for the tips. I have created a category for the sailing and a  free space for the ship.

Greg

Comments

Yes, I am an incorrigible "fiddler". After looking at some of the other ship categories, I have moved my categories to the following structure:

At the bottom level, and the category that I link my ancestors' profiles to, is the category for the sailing. In this case:

• SS Polynesian, sailed April 20, 1882

That links up to a category for the ship itself, to which profiles for other sailings of the Polynesian can also link:

• S.S. Polynesian (1872)

(What's new here is adding the year of launching to the title of the profile, since, as with other ship names, there have been other ships also named  "S.S. Polynesian".) 

 

The category for the ship links, in turn, to two other categories:

• Allan Line 
• 1870s Ships

(At first, I created a category for "Allan Line Ships", but then I saw that other similar categories just said "White Star Line" or "Cunard Line", so I renamed it and fixed the links.) As it happens, I have another family member who sailed on a different Allan Line ship, so now there are two categories listed under Allan Line. The other ship, S.S. Corsican (1907), became a Canadian Pacific ship after CP took over the Allan Line in 1907, so I created a Canadian Pacific Line category as well. (And the Corsican is linked to 1900s Ships since that was the decade when it was launched.)

 

The thought is bubbling in the back of my mind that it might be worth creating a "Shipping Lines" category, so that people could search for ships either by decade or by shipping line. And possibly even a category like "Immigrant Ships" or "Passenger Ship" or something like that, so they could search by decade, line, or name.

 

I also have Free Space profiles for the S.S. Polynesian and the S.S. Corsican (1907), linked to from the S.S. Polynesian (1872) and S.S. Corsican (1907) categories, respectively, but I see that the category for RMS Empress of Ireland has what looks like it should be a photo there (although the link is broken -- at least for me), so I'm still thinking that maybe the content from the free space profiles would work better in the categories, if I could just figure out how to put pictures on them.

 

I should also say that I added a link to the passenger list of the 20 September 1912 sailing (from the Library and Archives Canada site) to the SS Corsican, sailed September 20, 1912 category, to make it a little easier for people whose ancestors were on that sailing to source that.

 

Greg

---

Hi Greg.  You can't load a picture to a category but what you can do is link to a picture on a profile, such as a free-space profile.  I have done this for a ship of interest to me, HMS Titania.  You may like to have a look.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:HMS_Titania_(1915)

The picture appears on the Category by the use of this code on the Category page:

 {{Image|file=Barrow-1115.jpg
|align=c
|caption=HMS Titania
}}

Answer 2

There are many categories not yet set up.  If you look at Category: Ships, you'll see there are container categories set up for each decade, so that's a good place to park your category.  It looks like the Frenches sailed on the Polynesian in 1882.  What was the official name of the ship--RMS Polynesian?  When did it set sail? On your ancestor's profile, add:

[[Category: RMS Polynesian, sailed Month Day, 1882]]

Click save.  The category will appear as red. Click the category name and add

[[Category: 1880s Ships]]

as well as any other information you find about the voyage, including a sources section if you have any to share, etc.  Click save.  Voila, you set up your first category!  Let me know if you get stuck.

Answer 3

Greg,

In addition to the detail by H, Husted,which looks good, you might consider creating a Free Space with all of the detail on the ship - the Free Space would be a good place to include photos, if a one without copyright is available, as well as all the detail you wish.

The Free Space should also be included on the category page.

Comments

We did this for the ships that came with William Penn.  

Society Example