Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 29: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1827 (Roll 4, Images 361–480) — FREE

Installment 29 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests.

150 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 4, images 361–480, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 15,327 entries.

Every entry gives the person's name exactly as the clerk wrote it (or records honestly that no name survives), with sex, age, height, the clerk's class/colour column, the shipper or owner, the vessel, the master, the ports, and the date — plus the inspectors' endorsements, where the human stories live:

• The Shepherdess ten — nine children (Dick, 18, down to Peter, 9) and one woman, Dinny, 30, shipped under a Baltimore oath stating in plain words that they ARE entitled to freedom "at a certain time, and after a known period of service."

• Woolfolk's fourteen — on the Lady Richmond's manifest the printed words "for the purpose of being sold or disposed of as Slaves" are struck through and rewritten by hand: shipped by steamboat to Natchez "to be held to service or labour." Most carry full surnames — Nace Williams, Jack Woodlin, Reuben Finch — down to Fanny, aged 9.

• The Alligator's two surprises — 32 people from Norfolk; the arrival oath admits "one birth" (the newborn never named), and the Balize examination found one entry was "a female instead of a Male, as described on the list." Which one is never said.

• Lovey, 35 — shipped from Mobile with Patsy and David, but the inspector's endorsement names only "Patsy & David." Lovey has no landing note at all.

• Annette, 14, "left in Mobile" while her four shipmates landed; Rosaline, 9, travelling alone, her shipper signing the oath with her mark; Esther, 60, travelling entirely alone.

• The Pocahontas permission — no manifest table at all, just the collector's written permission: Agnes & Child, Catharine & Child, Luce, 16, Pleasant, 14, and Darkiss, 11. The two children are named only as "& Child."

Four entries have no name — a man whose name lies hidden under an overlapping sheet, the Alligator's newborn, and the two Pocahontas children. Where the papers disagree, both readings are printed. Nothing is guessed.

FREE, now and always. Please share it — somebody's ancestor is in here.

The frontispiece is Prince Demah's Portrait of William Duguid (1773) — art by an enslaved artist, CC0 (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Transcribed by hand from the National Archives' own scans. No index, database, or published book was copied. A companion name-list CSV for this installment, and the free guide 'Finding the Names: A Free Guide to the Public Records of America's Slave Trade,' are in our store; the Complete Set download holds the guide and every installment so far in one file.