Where the records actually are. The single most important thing to understand about maritime archives is the gap between catalogue online — common — and documents digitised and readable online — rare, and usually partial. This page separates the two. Entries are grouped by what you can do from a desk, and each notes which of the Atlas's open questions it could close.
Free full text — readable now, no login
These are the resources that let you do real research without leaving your desk or paying anything. They are the backbone of this project.
Yachting magazine, 1907–1961
Essentially the complete monthly run, free, downloadable, no account required. Covers the entire working life of the Bird, the Bear, the Farallone Clipper and the Mercury, plus the whole Golden Age of American yacht design. How to search it. The public archive.org/search?…&sin=TXT page is a JavaScript app and returns nothing to a script or a simple fetch. The method that works is three steps: list the collection's items via archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=collection:pub_yachting AND date:[YYYY-01-01 TO YYYY-12-31]&fl[]=identifier&output=json; fetch archive.org/metadata/<identifier> for each item's server and dir; then query that item's own search-inside endpoint, <server>/fulltext/inside.php?item_id=<id>&doc=<id>&path=<dir>&q="exact phrase". Quote the phrase — an unquoted multi-word query silently degrades into an OR of common words. This method recovered four Bay one-design classes that appear nowhere else online.
- Launch and christening notices for Bay boats
- Class roundups and yearbook features
- Design articles by and about the designers in this atlas
- Recovered the Junior Clipper, Acorn, Windward and P.I.C. classes in July 2026
Lloyd's Register of Yachts, 1878–1980
Eighty-three annual volumes, every one fully open with PDF and OCR text download. Each entry gives a yacht's dimensions, rig, builder, year and owner. This is the richest free yacht register run online and the fastest way to identify an unfamiliar boat by name.
- Identifying unattributed boats
- Confirming builder attributions
- Tracking ownership across decades
The Rudder, 1901–1930
Volumes 12–46 are full view. Edson B. Schock was the magazine's design editor from 1906 to 1910, and the Sabot pram that became the El Toro was published here in 1939 — though that later issue is beyond the open range.
- Early-century design articles
- Schock-era editorial content
Merchant Vessels of the United States, 1867–1989
Annual federal registers covering merchant vessels and yachts. The fastest route to a specific boat's official number, tonnage, builder and home port over time.
- Establishing a documented build year when sources disagree
- Confirming a builder from federal record rather than lore
Motor Boating, 1909–1930; Forest and Stream, 1873–1930
Two more fully open runs. Forest and Stream carried substantial yachting coverage through the whole Gilded Age and the rise of the Metre classes.
- Nineteenth-century and pre-WWI yachting coverage
Lloyd's Register of Ships Online, 1764–1998
Digitised and fully searchable by ship name, master, owner and place of build, free. A companion Register of Yachts subset runs 1878–2001. The Foundation is also digitising survey reports, ship plans and certificates — over 480 document types — though not all are online yet.
- Identifying and dating any vessel by name
- Builder confirmation for British and colonial-built boats
Built in America — HAER maritime documentation
The Historic American Engineering Record has documented historic vessels since 1985 with measured drawings, large-format photography and written histories — all free to download at full resolution. San Francisco Bay vessels documented include the steam tugs Hercules and Eppleton Hall and the ferry Eureka.
- Measured drawings of Bay vessels
- Construction detail for restoration reference
San Francisco Maritime NHP library collections
Around 330 items the park has posted itself, including runs of Log Chips, the San Francisco Maritime Museum's newsletter, and the museum's News Letter. Small but Bay-specific and free.
- Bay maritime history as recorded contemporaneously by the museum
The Chronicle — Herreshoff Marine Museum newsletters, 1979–2001
Twenty-two years of the museum's newsletter, fully open — a useful secondary source on Herreshoff boats and attribution questions.
- Resolving which Herreshoff designed a given boat
California Digital Newspaper Collection
Millions of pages of California newspapers, free and full-text searchable, including San Francisco titles from the Gold Rush onward. For a locally built Bay boat of 1904 or 1958, a launch notice in the Chronicle or the Call is the likeliest surviving record anywhere.
- Vixen (1904) and 'Peter Swanson'
- Salute (1958) and 'Huber'
- Launch notices for any Bay-built boat
Indexes and registers — find the citation, then find the scan
These do not hold documents but tell you exactly where a document is. Used against the free full-text runs above, a good index turns an afternoon of browsing into a single lookup.
Mystic Seaport periodicals index
A citation index to The Rudder (1891–1950), Yachting (1923–58, plus 1907–08) and MotorBoating (1931–75), searchable by vessel, designer, builder, type and length. It gives month, year and page — not the text. Pair it with the free Internet Archive scans of Yachting and you have a working full-text research loop.
- Finding contemporary coverage of a specific boat or designer
- Documenting the undocumented 1954 Bay classes
National Register of Historic Vessels
About 1,800 UK vessels with designer, builder, dimensions, construction, service history and images. Free and publicly searchable. The model for what a national vessel register should be.
- British-built boats and types
- Comparative practice for a possible Bay register
Australian Register of Historic Vessels
Over 800 vessels with designer, builder and owner background, searchable by type, class, era and geography. Run jointly with the Sydney Heritage Fleet.
- Australian and New Zealand designers and yards
Mylne Design Archive and Register of Yachts
The firm has been designing since 1896 and publishes an online archive of 792 individual designs plus a living register tracking surviving Mylne yachts, their ownership and restoration status. The drawings themselves are not published.
- Mylne attributions and survivals
Herreshoff Catalogue Raisonné
A free, continually expanded aggregation of records and photographs for roughly 2,000 Herreshoff-built craft, drawing on MIT, Mystic Seaport and the Herreshoff Marine Museum.
- Boats credited only to 'Herreshoff'
International Six Metre Archive; Dragon Class Archive
Two unusually well-built free community archives. The Six Metre archive holds design plans, photographs, race documentation and certificates; the Dragon archive (dragonarchive.org) holds country-by-country registries, builder pages, newsletters and results.
- Metre-class and Dragon research; Anker attributions
Online Archive of California and Calisphere
OAC aggregates finding aids from 350+ California institutions including SF Maritime NHP and the LA Maritime Museum. Calisphere is its digitised-content counterpart — but coverage is thin: SF Maritime has roughly 184 items on Calisphere against 150,000 plans in its vaults. Treat both as discovery tools, not substitutes for direct research.
- Locating Bay Area collections before contacting an institution
Ship Plans Directory
A directory of which American museums hold which plans collections. The right first stop when you know the designer but not the repository.
- Locating a designer's drawings
American repositories — the physical record
Where the drawings and papers actually live. Almost all require an appointment or a mediated request; almost none let you browse the documents online.
San Francisco Maritime NHP — Maritime Research Center
The most important repository for this atlas. Over 150,000 naval architecture drawings, almost entirely West Coast built vessels and yards — including Myron Spaulding, 2,300+ Sausalito boat plans (1940s–90s), Stone Boat Yard, about 2,000 drawings, David W. Dickie (~6,000), George H. Wayland (725 small wooden craft drawings, 1920s–40s), Union Iron Works (~50,000) and Moore Dry Dock. Plus 500,000 photographs, 1,800 archival collections and oral histories. Yacht holdings include the Yacht Racing Association records 1947–1962 — 54 legal folders and 14 scrapbooks of Bay yacht club newsletters, clippings and photographs assembled by YRA Recorder Don Seaton — plus San Francisco Yacht Club records 1880–1958, SFYC photographs c. 1900–1960s, and SF Maritime Museum photographs of yacht racing c. 1940–1959.
- The 1954 Bay one-design classes — Junior Clipper, Windward, Pic, Acorn
- Spaulding's design record
- Stone Boat Yard attributions
- Bird class first-boat builder
Jack Ehrhorn collections — Stone Boat Yard
Two large collections assembled by the Stone yard's master shipwright: naval architectural drawings 1898–1993, and photographs c. 1885–2005. The best primary source on the yard, and the material most likely to settle its disputed chronology and Lester Stone's role as a designer.
- Stone Boat Yard move dates
- Water Witch attribution
- Lester Stone as designer versus builder
MIT Museum — Hart Nautical Collections
About 120,000 plans across twelve named collections. Critically: MIT holds the primary surviving construction-plan archive of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company — described by the museum as 17,000 objects forming 'the primary design record' of HMCo, largely digitised. A 2015 MIT account gave 14,000 plans for 2,600 vessels, so the figure has been recounted over time. Note that no source, MIT's included, states this is the complete or exclusive universe of HMCo drawings. Also the John G. Alden Collection, the Frank C. Paine Collection, and the George Owen collection (described as almost entirely digitised).
- Alden design No. 157 — the Bird class
- Flame's Herreshoff/Burgess/Paine attribution
- The three unidentified 'Herreshoff' boats
Mystic Seaport Museum — Collections Research Center
Over 100,000 naval architectural drawings, 1827–2004. Designer collections directly relevant here: Philip Rhodes, William Garden, W. Starling Burgess, Henry J. Gielow Inc., Ralph Winslow, the Schock family, and J. Murray Watts — the most comprehensive surviving collection of Watts's plans, donated by Charles Wittholz after a fire destroyed Watts's own office. Also the Albert Strange plans, and 700 periodical titles.
- Gold Star's design lineage
- Freelance and the Gielow record
- Black Witch and the Winslow record
- The Schock question
Penobscot Marine Museum
Over 300,000 images, and unusually among American maritime museums, genuinely digitised and viewable online at scale. Ship plans include the Stanley Potter collection — a designer who worked at Luders, Sparkman & Stephens and Alden.
- Maine boatbuilding photography
- Comparative construction documentation
Maritime Museum of San Diego — Kettenburg Collection
Blueprints, sketches and diagrams for the Kettenburg 40, 41, 43 and 50, plus company and family history. The library holds 900 sets of vessel plans overall.
- Kettenburg research — requires a visit
NARA Cartographic Branch — ship plans
Engineering drawings for most US Navy vessels from the 1790s onward, plus Coast Guard cutters. Relevant here because so many Bay yards built Navy wooden craft in WWII — minesweepers, subchasers, harbour tugs, motor launches.
- Wartime output of Stone, Anderson & Cristofani, Madden & Lewis, Kneass and Wilmington Boat Works
Los Angeles Maritime Museum
Thousands of historic photographs viewable online, plus finding aids on OAC including the Muller Collection — a San Pedro and Wilmington boatbuilder — and Todd Shipyards LA Division engineering drawings.
- Southern California yards, including the Wilmington Boat Works context
Smithsonian NMAH — Ship Plans
Howard I. Chapelle's published and unpublished drawings, and the Historic American Merchant Marine Survey — a 1936–37 WPA project covering 166+ vessels in 400+ line-drawing sheets, much of it traditional American small craft.
- Vernacular American working craft, including scow and schooner types
Beyond the United States
Where the European and Pacific record lives — and where, in a few cases, digitisation is well ahead of American practice.
Norsk Maritimt Museum — drawing archive
About 55,000 boat and ship drawings, including the archives of Colin Archer, Johan Anker, Bjarne Aas, Jan Herman Linge and Bernhard Færøyvik. Archer's collection has been the subject of a dedicated digitisation project and is searchable on DigitaltMuseum.
- Farida and the Colin Archer type
- Laila, the 1928 Anker & Jensen 8-Metre
- The IOD fleet and Bjarne Aas
DigitaltMuseum
A genuinely large digitised aggregator, not just a catalogue. Sjöhistoriska museet alone has over 152,000 objects online including 88,000 photographs and 41,000 art and design items covering ship and technical drawings. Multilingual, images downloadable.
- Scandinavian design and construction across the whole Folkboat, Knarr, Dragon and Metre lineage
William J. Roué online archive
The gold standard for what a digitised single-designer archive can be: over 1,000 items including roughly 800 plans, 3D artefacts, blueprints, photographs and conservation notes, covering Roué's 200+ designs including Bluenose. Free, bilingual.
- The Gloucester–Lunenburg schooner rivalry
- A model for how the Atlas might one day present a designer
Scottish Yachting Archives
Established 2020, combining the G. L. Watson & Co. archive — design drawings from the 1870s onward, specifications, correspondence and photographs — with the William Fife & Son archive, plus Camper & Nicholsons material.
- Fife and Watson attributions
Royal Museums Greenwich — Caird Library and ship plans
Over a million ship plans, plus the Historic Photographs collection of roughly a million prints. A meaningful subset is viewable through the separate images portal at images.rmg.co.uk.
- British designers and the Big Class era
Classic Boat Museum — Uffa Fox archive
About 1,000 Uffa Fox photographs, wartime correspondence including the Air Ministry airborne-lifeboat dealings, and correspondence on International 14 construction.
- Uffa Fox and the planing dinghy
Hong Kong Maritime Museum
Listed here as an open question rather than a resource. No Cheoy Lee or American Marine boatbuilding archive could be confirmed in its published collections. Given how many boats in this atlas were built in Hong Kong, establishing where those yard records survive is worth a direct inquiry.
- Cheoy Lee and American Marine yard records — currently untraced
Private and licensed sources
Material this project can consult but cannot republish. Cited in full so that anyone with their own access can verify, and never reproduced.
WoodenBoat magazine archive
The complete run of WoodenBoat from 1974, available to subscribers as a searchable digital archive. This project has subscriber access and a separately maintained index of it. It is the single deepest body of writing on wooden boat design, construction and restoration in existence, and covers a great many of the designers, yards and classes in this atlas.
- Corroborating and deepening entries throughout
- Restoration and construction detail unavailable elsewhere
WoodenBoat Register of Wooden Boats
A free, public, owner-submitted register of individual wooden boats with designer, builder, dimensions and history. Distinct from the subscriber magazine archive and freely linkable. It resolved several otherwise unattributed boats for this atlas — Random, Kaze, Flotsam and Makai among them.
- Individual boat identification
- Owner-supplied build histories
Wooden Boat Atlas v3.0 · built 30 July 2026 · a project of the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation · licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 · open data · corrections