About Brendon Baillod's Great Lakes Shipwreck Research

I started this website in 1994 primarily as a link collection for my personal use. It was one of the first pages on the internet detailing information about Great Lakes shipwrecks. At that time, I had been actively researching Great Lakes maritime history for about ten years, but the internet immediately and dramatically improved my network of colleagues and access to information. In the ensuing years the website has grown modestly, had several facelifts and is now a principal resource for Great Lakes wreck divers and maritime historians. I do not actively add new content to the site very often due to time constraints, but I do maintain it and respond to inquiries.

I became interested in Great Lakes maritime history early in life, growing up on the Keweenaw Waterway in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I dived many local wrecks in the Keweenaw and began searching for and surveying new area wrecks in the Keweenaw Underwater Preserve. After moving to Wisconsin, I continued and enlarged my interest in Great Lakes maritime history, building a large collection of archival research and reference materials. Today, my collection contains over 3000 individual books, maps and articles of ephemera related to Great Lakes history. For an overview of the collection's contents click here.

I am active in many regional historical organizations. In 1999, I co-founded the Great Lakes Shipwreck Research Foundation and Milwaukee's Ghost Ships Festival. I served as a director of the GLSRF until 2003. Since 2002, I have served as a Director-at-Large for the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History (AGLMH), an umbrella organization comprised of all the major museums, historical societies and organizations in the Great Lakes historical community. I also helped start the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association's Annual Wisconsin Underwater Archeology and Maritime History Conference, which I currently chair. I am an active member of the Great Lakes Historical Society, the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Houghton County Historical Society and the Keweenaw County Historical Society.

I have published over 50 articles in several regional journals and publications, including Inland Seas, Soundings, Anchor News and many others. I have also published a book on the historical shipwrecks of the Port Washington, Wisconsin area and have a book in preparation on the shipwrecks of the Pentwater, Michigan area. I have appeared on the Discovery Channel, on the History Channel's Deep Sea Detectives series, on Michigan Public Television, Wisconsin Public Television and on numerous evening newscasts regarding Great Lakes shipwrecks and maritime history. I have been frequently quoted in the regional and national media regarding historic shipwrecks and preservation and maintain an active and extended correspondence with other researchers and historians.

I frequently present papers at maritime history conferences and have appeared at Duluth's Gales of November Conference, Milwaukee's Ghost Ships Festival, Minneapolis/St. Paul's Dive Into the Past, the 2006 NASOH Conference, and several others.

I have developed an expertise in appraising Great Lakes maritime antiquities and am frequently consulted to appraise individual items and collections of Great Lakes historical books, artifacts, art and ephemera. I have also developed expertise in the restoration and conservation of archival Great Lakes books, ephemera and maps. I actively watch the market for archival Great Lakes maritime materials and frequently acquire rare and unusual items. I also sell items.

I am a certified scuba diver with several certifications, but I no longer dive below 60 ft due mostly to the infrequency of my dives. I currently do only a handful of dives a year, most very shallow.

I have many current areas of interest and research in Great Lakes history. I frequently do primary historical research using many archival sources and I have a massive collection of news micro clips and other copied and original primary references. I do most of my research at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, one of the largest and best archives in the region.

I also actively collect archival Great Lakes marine accident lists, insurance registers and other rare and unique references for the purpose of transcription and digitization. I have spearheaded an effort to collect and transcribe all the registers of the Board of Lake Underwriters/Inland Lloyds (1855 - 1907) and all the known actuarial Great Lakes marine accident lists of the 19th century, of which many have been transcribed and placed online in searchable databases by me. I also worked with fellow marine historian Mike Spears to collect and digitize all the pre 1884 editions of the Annual Lists of Merchant Vessels of the United States, which are now available in digital form on CD-ROM. I have placed fellow marine historian Dave Swayze's authoritative shipwreck database into a relational database which can be searched on my website and I also host several other searchable historical Great Lakes databases.

I frequently search for specific shipwrecks with a number of Great Lakes wreckhunters, generally serving as an historical consultant and researcher. I also actively track all new discoveries and claims of discovery for Great Lakes shipwrecks.

I work closely with State and Federal efforts to preserve shipwrecks and I am an advocate of responsible public stewardship of historic Great Lakes wrecks. I also follow the legal cases involving challenges to State wreck ownership and am well versed in the history of successful challenges to the Abandoned Shipwreck Act. I am not an advocate of private ownership of truly historic Great Lakes shipwreck remains, but I do advocate limited and responsible recovery of historical shipwreck remains for public conservation and display. I don't believe it makes sense to leave important artifacts on the bottom for zebra mussels and other forms of natural weathering to destroy them. I do believe that all such recovery should be done only with proper legal authority and due diligence. Along these lines, I am happy to work with both State agencies and private professional salvors and wreckhunters, provided they recognize and follow the currently existing State laws. I have contributed over 100 new historical Wisconsin wreck entries from my personal database to the State Historical Society's Wisconsin Shipwrecks Database. I also actively work to nominate historic shipwreck sites to the National Register of Historic Places in order to ensure their legal protection.

I have a day job and work professionally as a Software Engineer. I have a Bachelors Degree in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Bachelors Degree in Management Information Systems from UW-Milwaukee. I have been a professional Java developer, designing, building and managing enterprise software applications for nearly ten years and I work as an employee for a regional financial services corporation specialising in educational loan services. I am a married father of one and live in the Madison, Wisconsin area. I can be reached at brendon@baillod.com or telephoned at 608.438.7246.