NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center has launched a project to collect and digitize local fishermen’s logbooks and related documents.
The project’s goal is to capture primary sources that tell the tales of the region’s rich commercial fishing history.
For generations, many fishermen kept handwritten logs of their time at sea.
These often include notes on where they were fishing, what they were catching, weather, sea conditions, and more.
A settlement sheet for each trip details the wages, expenses, and “share” for each crew member.
Taken together, logbooks and settlement sheets tell a valuable story of environmental and economic change over time.
How much fish was landed, where, at what time of the day, and the duration of the tow. What was the price at auction? How much did the crew get paid? What was the cost of fuel, ice, food, and other provisions?
Logbooks not only preserve what happened; they reveal how fishing communities responded when prices shifted, regulations changed, landings ebbed and flowed, and livelihoods came under pressure.
New Bedford has long valued its whaling story.
The city’s commercial fishing story deserves the same level of attention.
The Fishing Heritage Center has been collecting and preserving the fishing community’s history for more than a decade.
The online archive features thousands of historical photographs, documents, and recordings that tell the stories of the people behind New Bedford’s commercial fishing industry.
The Fishing Heritage Center urges fishermen and their families to share these materials with the archive to ensure that this history is preserved for future generations.