Finding the Names — Installment 48 (Roll 6: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1831) — FREE

Finding the Names is a free series that transcribes America's slave-trade records from the National Archives' own scans, name by name, so descendants can find their families. Every installment is free — please share it.

Installment 48 — New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1831: Roll 6, images 961–1,080, transcribed name by name by hand — 411 more entries (409 named, 2 unnamed) on 60 documents, 111 pages, June into December 1831.

The brig Betsey's packet sprawls across the whole installment — her docket claims 135 slaves from Norfolk, and her sheets, filmed in pieces from image 986 to 1058, name 134. The missing one can be pointed to: on the sheet at image 1058 her clerk's numbering jumps from 11 to 13, yet its foot total still reads "Twenty One" over twenty visible lines. Two of her sheets were photographed twice over and are printed once. Among the Levesque sheet's 49 are whole families entered as groups — "Betzy & Three children," "Lasel [?] & 5. children" — and one baby, Murry, aged "6 m."

Four people in this book stand on no manifest at all. The Ship Brunswick's table never appears in these images — only her docket ("Return of 4 Slaves"), a letter, and an inspector's examination. The letter, from R. J. Clarke to the Collector, 29 October 1831, begs leave to land three women and one man of Saml. Woolfolk's, just arrived from Baltimore, whom he found "so ill" that their preservation required they be removed on shore immediately. Its postscript names them: Mary, 22; Ann, 17; Kitty, 16; Charles, 19½ — the examination confirms all four, writing Charles as 19. They are entered here from the letter, as the people of the Morgan letter were in Installment 46. Angeline, 19, likewise stands on a single handwritten arrival note, "a negro girl the property of the undersigned."

The brig United States sails under a Norfolk permission for 145 persons; the two sheets filmed here name 44, and the rest of her sheets are not in these images — while two tiny United States filings nearby, of two and three people, carry permissions of their own and are no part of her. The schooner Reform's arrival oath swears to an annexed manifest that appears nowhere in these 120 images.

On the schooner Caroline, John, 30, is asterisked "did not come on board"; the examiner found the two Sallys landed, and Mary, 33, who had "gone with her Mistress as a Nurse." On the South Carolina, the examiner corrected Mary's class on the sheet itself: "Correct — with the exception of Mary — who is Black." The Orleans' Mobile certificate authorises "Forty Five" over a table of 44. And the brig Trebizond [?] out of Norfolk carries whole families under shared surnames — eight Lawrences, the youngest Silas, six months old.

Includes a searchable CSV name list of all 411 entries (name, vessel, age, shipper, and more). Honest about gaps: illegible and conflicting entries are flagged, never silently fixed.

With Installments 1–48 the series now holds 28,353 transcribed entries. Start with the free guide, "Finding the Names," and the free Complete Set, which gathers everything so far in one download.

— Okey and Susan Barker, Trails End