This story from CNN Europe tells of a guy who found a pocketwatch on an old shipwreck, and spent several years trying to track down descendants of the proper owner. It turns out the watch was lost from the ship Barbara in 1881.

Of course, with a very random name like “Barbara,” the vessel that the watch’s owner sailed on might not be one of the “Barbaras” currently in the database. On the other hand, you never know what the mention might actually be — it might not be about a whaling vessel, even though the resource is about American whaling, for instance.

It can often be worth tracking down each of these citations, just to see if they might lead elsewhere.