Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 37: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1828 (Roll 5, Images 601–720) — FREE

Installment 37 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests. The sixth installment of Roll 5 — the 1828 manifests. With this installment the series passes 20,000 entries: 20,585 in all.

829 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 5, images 601–720, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36).

Every entry gives the person's name exactly as the clerk wrote it (or records honestly that no name survives), with sex, age, height, the clerk's class/colour column, the shipper or owner, the vessel, the master, the ports, and the date — plus the inspectors' endorsements, where the human stories live:

• Moses, found — the last installment closed with the Ship Eagle's oath: "except Moses who died at Sea." Her tables open this one. Moses is entry No. 3: a man of 23, 5 feet 1¾ inches, with a faint pencilled "D.D." after his name. His death now stands joined to the whole of his description.

• Franklin & Armfield, in their own hand — the Brig United States' third 1828 sailing: 201 people from Alexandria, the first 149 shipped by John Armfield, consigned to Isaac Franklin of New Orleans. The inspector corrected the sheet in pencil: "Nancy No. 120 is a yellow girl"; "Betsy No. 144 should be Elvira."

• Jack, and the dengue — a letter giving an enslaved man sick with dengue fever permission to travel to the Bay of St. Louis "to visit his wife" and recover, with money advanced on the way. One of the rare documents in these rolls written for the enslaved man's own journey.

• The Dumfries' free men — two free Black men, Charles Fletcher, 50, and William Prim, 20, entered as "Apprentices," emancipated by the proprietor's own ancestor, travelling as attendant and cook alongside seventy people held for a term.

• Exact, and not exact — the Lafayette's sheets total exactly her permission's 172, and the Criterion's exactly her 114; but the Ajax's permission says 128 while her five sheets carry 167 entries. Both numbers are printed. Nothing is tidied away.

Three entries have no name — one name was lost where two filmings of a sheet join, though her age, height, and class survive. One table in this stretch was filmed wholly blurred; the loss is stated plainly.

FREE, now and always. Please share it — somebody's ancestor is in here.

The frontispiece is Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt (1885–86), sewn after emancipation from her memory of Bible stories — Smithsonian National Museum of American History, public domain.

Transcribed by hand from the National Archives' own scans. No index, database, or published book was copied. A companion name-list CSV for this installment, and the free guide 'Finding the Names: A Free Guide to the Public Records of America's Slave Trade,' are in our store; the Complete Set download holds the guide and every installment so far in one file.