Finding the Names, Volume One, Installment 5: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1820 (Continued)

By Okey and Susan Barker. FREE — please share.

Installment 5 of a name-by-name transcription of the slave ship manifests filed at the port of New Orleans, made by hand from the original records at the National Archives (Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, Microfilm M1895, Roll 1, images 490–609). 105 pages, 6x9, large print.

Inside: 293 entries on 53 manifests — the inward voyages of 1820, spring through November, from Charleston, Norfolk, Baltimore, Savannah, Mobile, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Havana. Each entry gives the person's name exactly as the clerk wrote it, with sex, age, height, the record's own class column, shipper/owner and residence, plus ship, master, ports, and date — and a full index of names tied to the Archives scan numbers.

The fullest record here is a sworn deposition: Marie, about 55, and her three children Lubin, Nina, and Hippolite, servants of a New Orleans widow who took them to Havana for her health and brought them home on the schooner Greyhound — described so closely that we know Lubin's missing tooth and the mark of Marie's nation she carried by her left ear, a mark from Africa itself. Also inside: Sylvia struck off the Cosmopolite's list with Isaac put aboard in her place; Jamson 'taken out in Charleston'; an eleven-year-old girl left at Norfolk whose name lies under the clerk's ink; and the brig Margaret Wright's two overlapping October lists, printed in full and flagged honestly. The art page carries the 1773 frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley, attributed to the enslaved artist Scipio Moorhead.

With Installments 1–4, the project now holds 1,881 entries. The whole New Orleans series holds roughly 114,000 name entries, and more installments will follow, voyage by voyage — all free. The companion guide and the growing Complete Set (everything in one download) are also free in this store.

If your family came through New Orleans, this is a place to look. Please share this freely — that is what it is for.