Since 1834, the Seamen's Church Institute (SCI) has operated as the largest and most comprehensive mariners' agency in North America. Over the decades, SCI's history has become inseparable from the story of the modern seafarer, as well as from the story of the development of downtown Manhattan and the Port of New Jersey. In March of 2010, a digitization team consisting of an Associate Archivist, a Digitization Assistant and a Communications Director began digitizing items from SCI's archives and publishing the content using Eloquent Archives(TM) software.
Johnathan Thayer, Associate Archivist at SCI, is very proud of what they accomplished in ten months. "We have digitized approximately 12,500 individual pages and images from SCI's archives," he reported. "The six series of our digital collection (Annual Reports, Minutes, Photo Scrapbooks, Photographs, Chaplains' Journals and issues of The Lookout) represent more than 176 years of SCI's history."
Explore this rich history of mariners by going directly to SCI's Database. You can search with an intuitive Keyword and learn to navigate throughout the database with various hyper-links. You can also move up and down the "tree" browse exploring the multi-level structure: record group, series, sub-series, file, and item.
Learn about other holdings and finding aids in the SCI Archives from the SCI Website.
-Corinne Hawksworth
For more resources about mission work and seafarers, the Congregational Library has an archive collection for the Boston Seaman's Friend Society.
-Jessica
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