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Find My Past Blog - Ask the Expert - lost at sea

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  • Find My Past Blog - Ask the Expert - lost at sea

    Our resident expert Stephen Rigden, pictured below, answers your queries.
    From Linda Durr:
    ‘I wonder if you could help me please. On Saturday April 17 1938 there appeared an article in the Lowestoft Journal about an engineer, Sidney Howe, who mysteriously disappeared while the fishing vessel was returning from the fishing grounds off Morecambe Bay Lightship in the West Coast. I can find no more information about this.
    I was told that there would have had to have been an inquest when the vessel returned to Lowestoft. The ship was the SDT Ramsey BayLT1290 skipper and owner was Mr. D.N Randlesome, 88 Crown Street, Lowestoft.
    I know that my grandma, mother and aunt were paid some insurance money from Lowestoft County Court but there is no date on the copy I received. Did they have to wait seven years before he was declared dead and the money paid out? Hoping you might be able to throw some light on this mystery.’
    Stephen says:
    ‘Thanks for this interesting enquiry. I did a little background research on the internet and found out that Chief Engineer Sidney Howe disappeared from the trawler – presumed lost overboard and drowned – on 14 April 1937. If the Lowestoft Journal article is from April the following year 1938, as per your email, presumably it was published after the inquest.
    In any event, there would be two possibilities for a peacetime death at sea in British waters. Some deaths can be expected to have been registered at the port at which the vessel docked upon its return to shore (in this case, Lowestoft).
    The majority, however, should appear in the series of General Register Office death indexes known as marine deaths. I searched these, and sure enough the death of a Sidney G Howe is shown in the GRO marine death indexes for 1936/37, aged 46, on the “Ramsay Bay”. You can, therefore, apply for a copy of the death certificate which, on the face of it, would seem to have been issued in 1937 (although it is possible that the index is one of GRO’s periodic cumulative revisions including later entries alongside contemporary ones).
    In any case, if you apply for the death certificate – which you can do online at http://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates – the certificate will give the date of death and the date of registration.
    The notion that seven years had to pass comes from the so-called Benjamin Order, used in probate matters, which is a presumption of death after seven years (its name comes from a 1902 court case which set the precedent). I doubt that seven years had to elapse before life insurance monies were paid out in this particular instance – as soon as the death certificate was issued, a claim should have been feasible. In any event, the date of registration of death given in the death certificate will give you the very earliest date that a claim could have been made.
    You can search the marine deaths on findmypast.co.uk’

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