Purpose
- To provide information concerning the RMS Lusitania and her passengers and crew.
- To serve as a hub to related sites.
- To provide a starting point in biographical and genealogical investigations on Lusitania‘s passengers and crew.
- To commemorate the Lusitania and the lives of her passengers and crew.
The Lusitania Resource is an international collaborative effort from Lusitania and ocean liner researchers all over, and contributions to this site are always welcome
Philosophy
The Lusitania Resource supports having multiple sources in any instance of research. Even as this website continues to expand, the development of more Lusitania websites is welcome and supported. Should you launch such another Lusitania site on the Internet, let’s do swap links.
Brief History of The Lusitania Resource
The Lusitania Resource is maintained by Ren-Horng James Wang. You can contact him and the research team here.
Back around 2002, Titanic dominated the ship- and nostalgia-lovers’ internet and very little showed up for a internet search on Lusitania. What did show up, however, was a list of passengers and crew on Rootsweb, maintained by Judith Tavares. Judith had a lot of information coming from different people and decendants of survivors but did not know how to make all the information available to everyone on the internet.
With Judith’s blessing, The Lusitania Resource was launched on 22 May 2003, hosted on bytenet.net, server space courtesy of Jeff Newman, administrator of the Titanic Mailing List and webmaster of GreatShips.net. The first pages of this website were created on Netscape Composer. The domain name, http://rmslusitania.info, was created on 7 September 2003, the 96th anniversary of Lusitania‘s maiden voyage.
The original intention of the site was to help Judith organize her information so that each passenger would have his or her own page, instead of having all the information about everyone on one single page. This webmaster could not have imagined the response triggered by the launch of this website. E-mails started pouring in from Lusitania researchers and relatives of past passengers, offering so much encouragement and help beyond my wildest expectations.
As The Lusitania Resource grew, the site also became unwieldy and disorganized for the HTML framework upon which it was concieved. After a brief experimentation with SilverStripe, The Lusitania Resource was converted to WordPress in early 2011 to better organize and centralize the site.
The Lusitania Resource could not have been possible without all the contributors who have helped build this site. Your support has been invaluable. Hopefully, this site will be able to beat Wikipedia’s Lusitania page in the search engine rankings by 2015. To this day, Lusitania sites are still few in number. If you are interested in the Lusitania and can build a website, build one!
