Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 27: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1826 (Roll 4, Images 121–240) — FREE

Installment 27 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests.

547 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 4, images 121–240, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 14,620 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:

• One dead, and one extra — the Brandy-Wine arrived with one of her twelve dead and one person aboard who is on no list at all. Inspector Fitz: "found them to agree, except one dead, also found one more on board… Landed all but the Extra One." Neither is named.

• A birth and a death — the Robert Burns' examination reports "one reported dead & one birth"; neither is identified. Her only infant is Lucy's unnamed baby, one month old.

• Fanny, 25, and her baby Anna, 1 — braced together on the manifest and marked "run away." Daly: "Excepting two that is said to have runaway."

• The James Monroe's missing eleven — six shippers' manifests name 74 people; the collector's certificate says "eighty five Persons." Eleven are unaccounted for.

• Horace, 8, and Bob, 14 — two boys shipped alone from Baltimore.

• Charity, 13 — "Dead to Day" written in a large hand across her row.

• Louisette — landed at New Orleans aged 25; shipped back out two days later aged 35. Both filings printed in full.

• The Hollon — cleared for Pensacola, examined there, and landed at New Orleans anyway, all 35 of her people aboard, including a man entered under the single name "Brother."

Five entries have no name — among them a baby entered only as "& an infant child of Daphne," whose mother is nowhere on the manifest. 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 Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt (1885–86) — art by a formerly enslaved artist, public domain (Smithsonian).

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.