Finding the Names — Installment 92 (Roll 11, 1847) — FREE

Finding the Names — Installment 92: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1847. Roll 11, images 841–960: 351 more entries (346 named) on 60 manifests, transcribed name by name from the original records at the National Archives (Record Group 36, Microfilm Publication M1895, Roll 11, NAID 173892418).

A stretch of the roll where the great Baltimore ships give way to the little Gulf packets. On the schooner Elvira out of Port Cavallo, Texas, a woman crossed entirely alone: Ellen, her age written out in full — "Ninety" — examined in person at New Orleans and certified to correspond with her description. The brig Quinny's last line names nobody at all: "Three Children or Infants," counted in her certificate's fourteen and described nowhere. Lewis, 28, stands on the brig David Duffill's table while the inspector writes that he was lost overboard days after clearing Wilmington. Kitty, 30, and her five children crossed on the 45-ton schooner Emma, their residence entered "On board" for every one of them — a family that lived on the vessel. A woman on the steam ship Yacht is entered as "Guiny," her name in quotation marks. Jack, 30, crossed from Apalachicola with his residence entered as Pennsylvania.

Free, like every installment — please share it. Where a manifest and its certificate disagree, we print both. First names are usually all the manifests give; an enslaver's surname is a clue for searching, not proof of the family's own name. Frontispiece: David Drake's signed poem jar of 1858 — Drake, enslaved in Edgefield, South Carolina, taught himself to read and write and signed his verse in clay. Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0.

— Okey and Susan Barker, Trails End