In March 2015, the North East Maritime Trust, having already researched the rescues carried out by the lifeboat, launched a project to find out about the men who formed her crew, with an appeal to relatives or anyone with connections with former crew who, through their own family history research, may have archive material, press cuttings, photographs or stories about their relatives, that can all be brought together to tell the full story of the Henry Frederick Swan.
Following press coverage in local newspapers and on television news, responses were received from 12 relatives and friends, living in Tynemouth, North Shields, Cullercoats, Whitley Bay, Chester-le-Street and Prudhoe, but also as far afield as Edmonton in Canada.
The original Story of the HFS was a file of 73 pages and 8MB in size and while the intention was to copy it into three much smaller files, by reducing the size of the photographs only the first and last parts have been produced so far.
Up to page 36 is the story of Henry Frederick Swan until she was replaced by the Watson class motor lifeboat, Tynesider, which arrived on the 1st December 1947 and that became Part 1.
Pages 36 to 64 were about the men and their relatives who formed her crew and that will be part 2.
Part 3 covers pages 65 to 73, up to her transfer to South Shields in May 2005 and is called her New Life and is available now.
Her story was covered in Newsletters from 2005 until this Website was up and running in 2014, then in Facebook until 2019 and now in X formally Twitter from July 2020.