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Notes on Sources
U.S. Navy Auxiliary Vessels Supplement, 1946-1980

U.S. Navy documentary sources after 1945

The starting point for this supplement was the collection of sources cited for the 1835-1945 section. However a lot of these do not cover the period after 1945, so many other sources were also consulted. The most detailed of these were from the postwar portion of Record Group 19 at NARA, much of which had been processed by 2023, but material from the Naval Historical Center (now NHHC) and the records from MARAD cited in the 1835-1945 section (notably the Vessel Status Cards and sale records) also made major contributions. The following (some also cited on individual pages) were the primary sources consulted for this supplement. In this list, UD means "undescribed," the case with most Navy records after accession from the Federal Records Center but before NARA processing. The "item" designations were titles provided by BUSHIPS, S-11 being preliminary design records, S-13 being hull design records, and S-15 being machinery design records.

NARA:
RG-19 Item S-11 Entry P-18, formerly Entry UD 1021-AG1 (Accession 67A5834)
RG-19 Item S-11 Entry P-21, formerly Entry UD 1021-Y (Acc. 69A1293)
RG-19 Item S-11 Entry P-26, formerly Entry UD 1021-W (Acc. 68A927)
RG-19 Item S-11 Entry P-37, formerly Entry UD 1021-E (Acc. 13419)
RG-19 Item S-11 Entry P-39, formerly Entry UD 1021-M1 (Acc. 63A3172)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P-61 Box 37, formerly Entry UD 1022-N (Acc. 64A3127)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P-62 Boxes 6-9, formerly Entry UD 1022-T and T1 (Acc. 66A5033)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P-62 Box 10, formerly Entry UD 1022-N (Acc. 66A5033)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P 62 Boxes 25-29, formerly Entry UD 1022-I (Acc. 61A2194)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P 62 Box 58, formerly Entry UD 1022-B (Acc. 15411)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P-62 Boxes 69-75, formerly Entry UD 1022-V (Acc. 68A2921)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P-62 Box 94, formerly Entry UD 1022-M (Acc. 63A3179)
RG-19 Item S-13 Entry P-62 Boxes 95-101, formerly Entry UD 1022-R (Acc. 66A4106)
RG-19 Item S-15 Entry UD 1024-A (Acc. 10875) (not yet processed)
RG-19 Item S-15 Entry UD 1024-AD (Acc. 65A5233) (not yet processed)
RG-19 Item S-15 Entry UD 1024-AQ1(Acc. 68A927) (not yet processed)
RG-19 Item S-15 Entry UD 1024-H (Acc. 59A0284) (not yet processed)
RG-19 Item S-15 Entry UD 1024-M (Acc. 59A2218) (not yet processed)
Correspondence files in RG-19 (BUSHIPS) and RG-428 (Dept. of the Navy)

NHHC:
Ship source files (Ships Histories), microfiche cards with ship movements (Operational Archives), CUP UA-437 (Photo Section), CNO 00 ("double zero") file, 1951-66 (Operational Archives, declassified through 1974 and now at NARA).

Other:
Naval Vessel Register (NVR), online.


U.S. Navy photographic sources after 1945

Many of the earlier photographs in this section came from the sources used for the 1835-1945 section, notably the various collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command and Record Groups 19-LCM and 80 in the National Archives. The most recent material found in RG 80 dates from the early 1950s and the acquisition of new material for the NHHC collection, both the cataloged NH series and the "L-file" or loose prints file, tapered off during the 1980s.

The National Archives have recently made available through their online National Archives Catalog (catalog.archives.gov) two additional photograph record groups relevant to this Supplement. RG-19-NN is a collection of BUSHIPS negatives (NN), mostly from the 1950s and 1960s and primarily showing ships under construction or conversion or just afterwards. The original handwritten BUSHIPS photo numbers are visible in many of these negatives, but the images can be found in the Archives catalog only with their NAID (National Archives Identifier) numbers (provided here).

Of greater overall importance, Record Group 330 (Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense) contains a series called the Combined Military Service Digital Photographic Files, 1982–2007 (Series 330-CFD, NAID 6274097). This series began with digital reproductions of analog photographs taken by photographers of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and to a lesser extent the Coast Guard, and then transitioned to born-digital photographs taken by most of the same military branches. The first 19 born-digital images appeared in 1993, and by 2000 the majority of images received were born-digital. The series combines collections created successively by three agencies within DoD: the Defense Audiovisual Agency (21 Jun 1979-30 Sep 1985), the Naval Imaging Command (1988-ca. 1993), and the Defense Visual Information Center (29 Mar 1996-26 Oct 2007), the latter being under the American Forces Information Service and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs). In 2009 the National Archives accessioned the images that had been sent to the DoD central photographic repository through 2007. The photographs are identified by Still Depository Accession Numbers (SDAN) that are formatted with three two-character groups followed by a five digit number. Photographs with a "C" (color negative), "T" (transparency), "N" (black-and-white negative) or "P" (print) as the fourth digit of their SDAN are digital reproductions, while photographs with a "D" as their fourth digit are born-digital (example: DN-SD-07-04600, in which DN probably stands for Department of the Navy and 07 is probably the year or fiscal year in which the image was filed). These photos can be found by searching the Archives catalog with their SDAN numbers provided the search is conducted within Record Group 330 (an option in the Archives catalog); otherwise their NAID numbers (not provided here) are needed. Note that, given the inability of early formatted databases to handle missing data, "1 June 1987" could mean "circa June 1987" and "1 January 1993" could mean "circa 1993." Note also that, although Series 330-CFD contains 269,667 items, the vast majority of its photographs are of personnel and events, not ships.

As of now there appears to be no similar official repository available to the public for all DoD or Navy photography since 2007. The Navy, MSC,and Coast Guard websites each have sections called "Photo Gallery" (the Navy one is at www.navy.mil/Resources/Photo-Gallery), but photos appear to be dropped from these after they age a few years. The oldest ones in the Navy photo gallery as of 2023 are from 2015. The photos are often excellent, but only a handful of ships on this site lasted long enough to be represented in them. (The outstanding exceptions are AGC/LCC 19-20 and AS 39-40.) Fortunately Wikimedia Commons collected quite a few views between 2007 and 2015 that were apparently later dropped from these official galleries, and Wikimedia thus becomes the primary means of filling the gap between Record Group 330 and today's photo galleries. The photos in these galleries are identified only by Visual Information Identification Numbers (VIRIN), which the earlier photos also have and whose format differs from that of the SDAN numbers described above. The first six digits of the VIRIN provide the year, month and day the photo was taken, the rest identify the photographer.