About the records
Where they come from
The Wreck Files publishes U.S. Coast Guard reports of vessel casualties and wrecks held by the National Archives on microfilm. Each report is a form filled in by a master, owner or agent and stamped by clerks when it arrived.
Two kinds of form appear: the one-page Wreck Report, and the two-page Report of Casualty. We show them as a single record with both pages, in order.
How the text was read
The scans are grainy, tilted microfilm. A vision model read each page and transcribed the thirty numbered items, the stamps and the signature. This is a careful transcription, not ground truth. Always check a record against its scan.
- Free text is verbatim: the clerk’s spelling, abbreviations and capitalization.
- Any field can be empty. A blank means it wasn’t read, not that the form was blank.
- Notes record pencil corrections, struck-through text and illegible parts that the reader saw on the page.
- Dates are shown parsed only when the year was clear; otherwise you see the text as written.
Automated checks
We run simple checks, for example whether a crew count appears in the transcribed text. When a check can’t confirm a value, the field shows Check scan. That means “look at this”, not “this is wrong”.
Pages being re-read
Some pages were read with an earlier version of the reader and will be re-read. Their free-text fields can contain stray commentary, which is shown rather than hidden. Records will change as pages are re-read, and coverage grows as more rolls are processed.
Spotted a mistake?
A way to report a wrong reading is coming. Until then, the scan beside each record is the authority.