Finding the Names — Installment 51 (Roll 7: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1832) — 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 51 opens Roll 7, the inward manifests of 1832–1836: images 1–120 transcribed name by name by hand — 805 more entries (793 named, 12 unnamed) on 55 manifests, 203 pages. The series now holds 30,802 transcribed entries — past thirty thousand.

The brig Tribune carried 222 people on one March–April 1832 voyage, filed in two packets — 88 from Norfolk and 134 from Alexandria — and for once both filings match their certificates exactly. Franklin & Armfield's schooner Lafayette is exact too: 119 entries, her foot total, both oaths, and her clearance all agreeing. Against Alexandria entry 5, Edward Fletcher, a margin note reads "Decd" [?] — deceased.

Two men died before their ships reached the city, and the examiners wrote it down. On the brig Ariel's Landers manifest, Locke (No. 4) is X-marked and endorsed "reported to have died in the River above the Balize"; on her Banks manifest, Charles (No. 6) is endorsed simply "Charles — Dead." The Ariel filings are tangled: her collector's certificate says "twenty in number" against John Nolan's table of 31, and the roll's very first manifest — the Ariel again, out of Norfolk — carries permissions saying 27 over a table of 28 numbered entries covering 29 people, with Rachael and her child struck through, landed at Norfolk as "not being intended to be shipped," and Charles, 26, shipped in their place.

The brig Julia's two Baltimore manifests are Maryland term-service filings, her purpose clause corrected in ink: the people are "to be held to Service or Labour in Louisiana and not to be sold for Five Years after arriving in said State." The schooner Mary Ann was bound not for New Orleans but for Madisonville, and carries an infant whose name was written and then heavily obliterated. The bark Virginian's papers are dated 1851 throughout — manifest, oath, certificate, and inspection — though they lie on an 1832 roll; they are printed as written. Nine shippers' sheets of the brig Ajax name 148 people against a permission that begins only "Eighty and —"; and at the installment's end another Ajax sheet opens a manifest whose remaining sheets stand in Installment 52.

Includes a searchable CSV name list of all 805 entries (name, vessel, age, shipper, and more). Honest about gaps: illegible and conflicting entries are flagged, never silently fixed.

With Installments 1–51 the series now holds 30,802 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