F rom the late 1700s to the early 20th century, tens of thousands of merchant sailors worked tirelessly aboard Maine ships, transporting cargoes between ports around the world. It was an extremely hard and often hazardous occupation, and the men and women who chose it labored in relative obscurity, their identities relegated to crew lists, pay records and the other essential paperwork of the ship’s owners.

Ancestors, researchers, scholars and generally curious people now have a new starting place to begin searches for information about merchant sailors who sailed aboard Maine ships during the early years of Maine’s history: the Merchant Mariner Muster, conceived and offered by the Maine Maritime Museum at its website, www.mainemaritimemuseum.org.

“Historic information about who captained a ship when it sailed on a particular voyage has always been readily available through historic publications and, more recently, in electronic databases of historic materials,” said Nathan Lipfert, senior curator at Maine Maritime Museum. “But finding information about the crew of those vessels, if not impossible, could take even a seasoned researcher months of digging through handwritten records and ship logs.”

The curators at Maine Maritime Museum knew that a treasure trove of such information was buried in the millions of pages of shipping company and personal documents in the museum’s library vaults, Lipfert said, but the financial and human resources required to extract and compile that information are scarce commodities for an independent nonprofit museum.

In 2008, the Council on Library and Information Resources, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, created the Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program to support the identification and cataloging of special collections and archives of high scholarly value that are difficult or impossible to locate. Maine Maritime Museum applied — and, in 2011, was one of 19 institutions nationwide selected to receive a grant. Additional funding later came from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in spring 2013.

During the 18-month project, two archivists poured through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents in 45 separate manuscript collections at the museum on Washington Street.

The papers included numerous Maine sea captains’ business papers, crew lists and voyage accounts, some ship owners’ and customs house records and a shipping agent’s records.

The catalog database, named the Maine Maritime Museum Manuscript Collection Online Catalog, is available on the museum’s website.

Once the catalog work was completed, the archivists along with staff, volunteers and summer interns began to build the Merchant Mariners Muster database using information about the individual sailors extracted from documents in the catalogued collections. This second database is also available on the museum’s website.

“Although the collections are Maine-related, they are records of travels to major and minor ports all over the world and therefore are a valuable resource for the exploration of maritime history worldwide,” Lipfert said. “The sailors came from all over.”

Lipfert also indicated that information about mariners will continue to be added to the database by staff, volunteers and interns as resources permit.

“They may have been common sailors, but the work they performed was anything but common,” he added, “and now their identities are no longer hidden.”

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