Finding the Names, Vol. One, Installment 18 — New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1823

Installment 18 of Finding the Names, Volume One — the first from Roll 3 — 586 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans ship manifests at the National Archives (Microfilm M1895, Roll 3, images 1–120). 216 pages, large print. FREE — please share it so families can find their people.

Jacob was 17, five feet seven, and one day from New Orleans when he fell overboard from the brig James Barron and drowned. Her master's oath remembers him only as "one who was lost overboard" — Inspector Yates's report gives him back his name. A day earlier or later and the record might never have said it.

Also in these pages: Francis Victor, four and a half years old, shipped alone from New York — the inspector noted he was "a Creole of this City," a New Orleans boy coming home by himself; the James Monroe's certified "149 persons" who were really 163, fourteen of them infants hidden inside their mothers' "& Infant" lines, plus one more baby born on the passage and recorded nowhere else; full surnames, the rarest thing in these papers — Sally Turner, Harry Johnson, Amos Johnson, Joe Smith; eight children shipped alone from Yorktown whose names the clerks couldn't copy straight; and Tom the laborer and Jim the tanner, whose trades the clerks wrote where a colour belongs.

Counting this installment, the Finding the Names project has recovered 10,651 entries from the New Orleans manifests, every one free. The companion guide and the Complete Set (Installments 1–18 in one download) are also free in this store.