A vessel can appear under different names in a collection. Before making two separate entries in a sailing notebook, ask whether the records might describe different stages of one ship’s life.
Start with a small identity table: name as written, date of the record, identifying number if supplied, and the archive reference. Leave an empty cell where evidence is missing. Similar names alone are not enough to join the entries, and a changed owner does not automatically establish a renamed vessel.
The Royal Museums Greenwich library and archive guide points researchers towards crew records and official numbers. Those identifiers offer a more useful research trail than a name detached from its date.
Preserve the wording of each record
In an invented example, a postcard names a vessel Dawn while a later catalogue calls it Morning Star. Keep both descriptions and their sources. Write “possible connection to investigate” until a reliable record explicitly links them; do not quietly merge the captions.
Once the connection is documented, arrange the names along a timeline rather than replacing every earlier name with the latest one. This lets a reader understand why an old photograph, a crew agreement and a museum label can use different wording without necessarily contradicting each other.
Editorial illustration from the site’s image collection.