Contact
This database is not finished, and never entirely will be. Anyone who knows something, holds something, or spots something wrong is very welcome.
What would help most
- Photographs and documents. Discharge books, seamen's books, letters, ship photographs, crew photographs. A scan or a phone photo is enough.
- Dates and places of birth. The source gives none. Without them two men of the same name cannot be told apart with certainty, nor joined together with certainty.
- Corrections. Names were transcribed from printed lists that themselves contain errors. If you see a name set down wrongly, or a relative missing, please say so.
- The unnamed. 270 people aboard are counted but never named. Every name recovered is one more.
An open question: who was the Persier's nurse?
The MAS in Antwerp holds this photograph under the name mevrouw Sterckx: a nurse with the Compagnie Maritime Belge, lost when the Persier was torpedoed on 11 February 1945.
The Persier's crew list knows only one nurse, and names her Vanderhaeghen Louise, with the note body never found. A reference work on the U-boat war, independently, names her the same way, and likewise places her first on the Leopoldville and then on the Persier.
It is therefore almost certainly the same woman, most likely catalogued under her married name. That is not proven. Do you know for certain, or do you recognise her?
This database is free and will stay free. No advertising, no paywall, no sign-up. It is made in my own time, alongside the work at sea.
If you would rather help with a contribution than with a photograph, that is welcome too.
What happens to what you send
Photographs and documents are published only with your permission, credited as you ask. If you would rather something were not put online but still recorded in the data, that is possible too.