Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 30: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1827 (Roll 4, Images 481–600) — FREE

Installment 30 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests.

361 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 4, images 481–600, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 15,688 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:

• Auguste came home — aged 12, taken to Texas under a sworn mayor's declaration made expressly so he could be brought back — and brought back he was: the 1828 return certificate shows him to the inspector, arrived in his master's company.

• The Columbia's blank page — a Mobile manifest whose Names column was left entirely blank: a man of 26 and a woman of 40, described in full, inspected, landed, and never named.

• Rossetta, about 5 — "a little White Girl" recorded only in the Ship States' oath, on no manifest table at all.

• The Ajax's 123 — the sailing's papers recite 123 people; the filmed lists hold 122. Sylvia, 19, travels with "Mary her Child," aged 3.

• The Trafalgar's thirty — Baltimore families under the term-service oath, their manifest's printed "sold as Slaves" struck through, and a birth at sea on the passage.

• Clarissa, 11 — shipped alone from Baltimore as "a present to his daughter Catherine McLee, for her own use."

Six entries have no name, including the Columbia's two and a baby born on the Trafalgar's passage. 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 the 1773 frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley, attributed to Scipio Moorhead — art by an enslaved artist (Library of Congress).

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.