Finding the Names — Installment 54 (Roll 7: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1833–1834) — 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 54 — Roll 7, images 361–480 transcribed name by name by hand: 902 more entries (892 named, 10 unnamed) on 62 manifests, 224 pages. The series now holds 32,750 transcribed entries.

The brig Ariel sails twice in this installment, and both times her papers agree to the person: December's 139, exactly her Norfolk permission's "one hundred & thirty nine Persons," with a marginal "Dead" standing beside Elizabeth and her child Mary — which of them it marks, the sheet does not say; and October's 205, exactly her permission's "Two hundred & five," the examinations recording Joe Whitehurst dead on the passage and Tom Doyle not found on board. The brig Uncas also appears twice — 128 people (Armfield shipping to Franklin; her Alexandria certificate dated 1834 over a January 1834 examination, a clerk's year error, flagged) and 105, families under full surnames, with the Balize examiner's correction written on the sheet: "a Mistake of Henry — instead of Ellen Butler."

The installment opens by closing the last one: the brig Hope's missing Baltimore certificate stands at image 361 — John Craig's Tom, "one in number," 5 December 1833. The brig Dimon's examiner found a man aboard "for whom there is no owner — he says his name is Susthes [?], is about forty years old"; he stands on no table, so he is carried here in the notes, as the rules of this series require. The Dimon's own 45-person manifest survives only from entry 27 — entries 1–26 appear nowhere in these images. Elsewhere the examinations speak plainly: Mary Ann of the Crawford, "not on board"; Emily of the Plutarch, "Not found on board"; Sarah of the Three Sisters, "taken away by the Owner."

Small things, kept as written: a Hope sheet whose clerk used entry number 13 twice and left one line — "Job" — with no number and no particulars at all; the Enterprize's Delia, whom a pencil note renames Silvia; the brig Aree's April 1832 sheet filed among the 1834 papers, her permission claiming 92 people across annexed manifests that are not filmed here; and three children on the ship Washington carrying surnames of their own — Peter Bowman, 9, John Papen, 17, and James Blony [?], 7, whose shipper signed his name by mark.

Includes a searchable CSV name list of all 902 entries (name, vessel, age, shipper, and more). Honest about gaps: illegible and conflicting entries are flagged, never silently fixed.

With Installments 1–54 the series now holds 32,750 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