Finding the Names — Installment 47 (Roll 6: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1831) — 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 47 — New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1831: Roll 6, images 841–960, transcribed name by name by hand — 695 more entries (681 named, 14 unnamed) on 58 documents, 167 pages, March into July 1831.

The brig Bourne out of Norfolk is a tangle. Her four shippers' sheets name 176 people — yet her Norfolk permission says her manifest consists of 114 persons, with the number word itself overwritten. Her New Orleans examination sheet reports seven men and two women found aboard with no manifest at all, covered only by bills of lading, and names four more — William, Stephen, Tom, and Sally — who were aboard but appear on no sheet. Those four are entered in this book as endorsement-only entries; the nine unnamed are described in the notes. A Martha, 37, is noted "yellow instead of Black" — but no Martha of 37 stands on any of her sheets.

The schooner James Monroe's papers reach back into Installment 46: her Alexandria permission authorises 151 — the 112 named on the sheets here, plus an annexed sheet of 39 shipped from Norfolk that was printed as the last document of the last installment. The brig Ajax appears yet again, her permission claiming 190; the seven sheets filmed in this stretch, sworn between 20 April and 2 May 1831, name 119 — and the rest of her sheets do not appear in these images.

John Armfield's Lafayette survives only from entry 31 — her first sheet is nowhere in these images. Entry No. 54, Dick, 24, "has been Relanded and is not now on board," which is how 89 numbered entries become the master's sworn 88. The South Carolina's second sheet enters a 13-year-old under no name but "Boy"; the Balize examiner corrected the record himself — "The Boy on board, but is named Ben." And on the Crawford, Martha, 40, travels with her daughter Nelly, seven weeks old, whose height the clerk entered as "in arms."

Twice in this stretch a Mobile certificate authorises a schooner Orleans to proceed with "One in number" while her table names more — two men on one sailing; and on another, Jno Abney's table names Mary, 43, her two small children, Harmer, and Eliza — five souls under a certificate that speaks of a single slave. Both readings stand as written. On the Elizabeth out of Pensacola, Celia, 12, never reached the city at all: the margin reads "Landed at Petit Coquille."

Includes a searchable CSV name list of all 695 entries (name, vessel, age, shipper, and more). Honest about gaps: illegible and conflicting entries are flagged, never silently fixed.

With Installments 1–47 the series now holds 27,942 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