SCI Archives

The Seamen's Church Institute has operated in the Port of New York since 1834. Over the years, SCI has adapted to meet the ever-changing needs of seafarers, anticipating and reacting to changes in the maritime industry and the Port of New York. Because of this, the story of SCI is inseparable from the story of the modern seafarer, as well as the story of the development of downtown Manhattan and the Port of New Jersey.

If it happened here, then it is in our records.

SCI's archives consists of seventy boxes (approximately 90 linear feet) of correspondence, ledgers, deeds, articles, memos, financial records, and subject files that date back to the inception of the organization. Additionally, scrapbooks, lantern slides, annual reports, issues of The Lookout and thousands of photographs can be found on our shelves.

We invite you to explore our Digital Collection where we have digitized more than 12,500 archival items so far and where we are adding more items to the collection each day.

• The "Finding Aid to the Digital Collection" is a good place to get started. It will tell you what's in the Digital Collection and where to find it. Click on the Finding Aid tab to access the PDF document.
• Click on the Online Collection tab for a link to SCI's Digital Collection.

 

Finding Aid

SCI archivists have created Finding Aids describing the contents and organization of our collections.

Click on the document below to access a Finding Aid for the current catalog of SCI Archives—approximately 85 linear feet of processed archival material, including items not yet digitized.

Click on the document below to access a Finding Aid for the SCI Archives Digital Collection.

Online Collection

Click on the link below to enter our database hosted by Eloquent Systems. Inside find instructions on how to locate items within the six series of the collection: Annual Reports, Minutes, Photo Scrapbooks, Photographs, Chaplains' Journals and The Lookout.

Click here to go to SCI Archives Digital Collection.

We want to hear from you. Do you have questions about items in the collection? Did an item or photograph bring back a memory or a good story? Are you having trouble using the database? Let us know! Email archives@seamenschurch.org

For a technical recap of our process in digitizing, read about SCI’s digitization project here.