Description: Official Records of the Union & Confederate Navies printed 1894-1921 are an excellent source of info on shipwrecks of blockade runners, ironclads, gunboats, etc
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Home Researching Civil War Shipwrecks
Perhaps the overall best source for researching Civil War shipwrecks is a set of books titled The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion . Better known as the “O.R.—Navy” or “ORN”, it consists of 30 volumes. Each volume is about a thousand pages long. They were compiled after the war and printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. between 1894 and 1921, with one or more volumes coming out each year. Only a thousand copies of each volume were p
These records include official correspondence, dispatches, excerpts from vessel logs, etc. and are an excellent source of contemporary records relating to shipwrecks of all types during the War Between the States. These wrecks range from blockade runners and ironclad warships to riverboats, barges and ferries. Shipwrecks of both steam and sail are well represented. Unfortunately the volumes are poorly indexed, so a careful reading of the records for a particular time period and location is frequently necess