Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 33: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1827–1828 (Roll 5, Images 121–240) — FREE

Installment 33 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests. The second installment of Roll 5 — the 1828 manifests.

867 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 5, images 121–240, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 17,627 entries.

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:

• The Jefferson's dead baby — her last entry is an infant aged "2 Weeks," struck through and marked deceased by the inspector, with a note braced against the final entries: "one child born on board." Maria Diggs, aged 3, has "Dead" written against her entry too.

• "Lucys child not on board, put on shore at City Point. The rest agreeing with description." — Lucy sailed on to New Orleans without her baby. The Columbia's own numbers disagree three ways; all are printed.

• Betty, 16 — "reported to have run away in Charleston before the Vessel sailed." Mary, 30, made the passage alone.

• A count that lands — the James Monroe's Norfolk permission says 173 people; the sheets transcribe to exactly 173.

• Shipped home — Louis, about 16, and Bill, 13, Baltimore boys belonging to a New Orleans doctor's wife, sent back to Louisiana under oaths swearing they were not sold as slaves for life.

Thirty-one entries have no name — nearly all unnamed infants entered as "& Child" on their mothers' lines, plus two names obliterated by striking-through. Where the papers disagree, both readings are printed. Nothing is guessed.

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

The frontispiece is a signed poem jar by David Drake, "Dave the Potter" (1858) — art by an enslaved artist (Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0).

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.