Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 26: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1826 (Roll 4, Images 1–120) — FREE

Installment 26 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests.

168 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 4, images 1–120 (the "Jan.–April 1826" section and the opening of "May–Dec. 1826"), National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 14,073 entries.

This is a smaller installment than most — the traffic of early 1826 was mostly small coastal schooners carrying a handful of people at a time. 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 Algerine's two filings — one brig, one sailing, two Woolfolk manifests: Abby, 23, braced with her daughter Charlotte, 1; and two other girls both named Charlotte, 13 and 12.

• Laman's two men, found — the Traveller's certificates authorised three people but only one table sat with them; Edward ("Forty," written out in words) and Philip ("Thirty") turned up later in the filming. The table calls their shipper "J. B. Laman," his oath "G. B. Laman." Both are printed.

• The States' forty — Woolfolk's Baltimore manifest, with babies who exist only as "Sarah, her daughter" and "Addison, Betty's son," and Lewis, a man of 19 who stands 4 ft 2 in as written.

• Harry, 19 — shipped from Mobile with his residence entered simply as "Unknown."

• Robinson Cruzoe, 21 — a real name on the Maria's outward manifest, filed among the inward papers; he and his eight shipmates were later brought back to New Orleans on the Genevieve.

• Cyrus, 38 — shipped as the property of a dead man: "Estate of J H Pyatt owner."

• Esther, 10 — travelling entirely alone from Pensacola.

• Etienne, 36 — brought from the Bay of St Louis in an open boat by the man who had just bought him.

One entry has no name at all: a woman whose whole line on a Baltimore filing was written and then struck through, her name obliterated; the certificate's count is corrected by hand from "two" to "one." She is printed here exactly as the clerk left her.

Where the papers disagree — and they often do — both readings are printed, disagreements and all. Nothing is guessed.

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

The frontispiece is The Westwood Children (c. 1807) by Joshua Johnson, born into slavery in Baltimore and freed in 1782 — art by a formerly enslaved artist, 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.