United States Navy cruise books have long been created to commemorate a vessel’s deployment. The books are not official Navy publications, but rather are keepsakes created by Navy volunteers. They typically contain a lot of pictures. The Navy has provided about 3,500 cruise books to Ancestry.com. Vessels deployed from 1918 through 2009 are represented by a staggering 4,857,924 searchable records now available in the collection. These include more than half a million images.
Access to the cruise books requires a paid Ancestry.com subscription but you can see a sample of them free of charge in an article by Michael Kolomatsky in the New York Times' City Room blog at http://goo.gl/qMrw3.
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