Ninety-five years ago, on April 14, 1912, the British White Star Line's largest ship, the R.M.S. Titanic, hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank. Out of her approximately 2,200 passengers and crew, 1,522 lost their lives in the sinking with the remaining survivors being rescued the next day by another ocean liner the Carpathia.

In honor of the 95th anniversary of the tragedy, the British genealogical research site, FindMyPast.com, has just published copies of the original handwritten passenger lists for that fatal maiden voyage of the Titanic, and has made them available on their site for free for a short time during mid-April 2007. During the free viewing period visitors are able to view and download copies of these pages for free. In order to view them a person must first register on the site but registration is also free.

According the FindMyPast.com site, the normal per page charge to view and download a passenger ship list is £3 (the current conversion rate for British pounds to U.S. dollars is £1 = $1.98). Since the passenger list for the Titanic runs to 34 pages, viewing and downloading the entire list would cost £102 or U.S. $ 202.

The original lists are the property of the British National Archives in London where they have been stored in two boxes following the conclusion of the official inquiries into the sinking. One box contains the pages listing the passengers who boarded at the ship's home port in Southampton, England and the other box contains the smaller group who boarded at Queenstown in County Cork, Ireland (Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom in 1912). Because the paper on which the lists were written is fragile (since the list was a working document and not intended for posterity, the quality of the original paper was not that high), access to the lists has been restricted to just a few scholars in the past. Now, these lists are available for the world to view on line

The Southampton lists are in better condition than the Queenstown lists. First of all, the paper does not seem to have crumbled as much as the paper on which the Queenstown ones have crumbled. Second, the writing on the Southampton lists was done in a dark blue ink that does not appear to have faded over the years, while the black ink on the Queenstown lists does appear to have faded. As a result, I found the Southampton ones much easier to read than the Queenstown ones.

In order to view the lists you will have to download and install a free Plugin called DjVu from LizzardTech. Downloads are then saved in a DjVu file format and the Plugin is required to view the files that have previously been downloaded and saved to your disk.

When you register for the FindMyPast.com site, which you have to do in order to view or download the free copies of the Titanic passenger lists, you have to agree to the Terms and Conditions of the site and among these is a notice that the downloaded material cannot be published (including being re-posted on the Internet) or sold by you. The only exception is if the material is being used in the publication of an individual family history. Thus, individuals may include relevant materials (such as a copy of the page from the Titanic passenger list in which their ancestor is listed – but not copies of the entire 34 pages of the list) from the site in their history and professional researchers can also include relevant materials from the site in individual family histories they are preparing for clients. Such histories can then be published and sold or posted on the Internet.

Finally, while the FindMyPast.com site is the only site on which copies of the original, handwritten passenger list for the Titanic can be found, there are other sites, such as The Library of Virginia or The Encyclopedia Titanica Organization which have lists of the passengers or copies of pages from old newspapers in which the names of the passengers are listed.