Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 32: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1827–1828 (Roll 5, Images 1–120) — FREE

Installment 32 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests. This installment OPENS Roll 5 — the 1828 manifests.

378 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 5, images 1–120, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 16,760 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:

• Carter, 22 — his class entry reads "Free mulatto," written over another entry, and the four men below him carry it by ditto marks. Five men written down as free on a slave manifest.

• A shipment of nothing but children — seven of them, ages 11 to 16, no adults at all, consigned toward Natchez. Another filing in this stretch is consigned "for Col. Zach. Taylor."

• The Onyade's ten — eight children out of ten from Baltimore, the youngest Sandy, aged 2, his height filled in with ditto marks.

• The Jefferson's surnames — Mary Johnson, 40, with Henry, 3, and Sophy, 9; and "Catharine her Child," 8 months old, with no Catharine anywhere on the sheet.

• Four girls, each entirely alone on her own manifest — Fanny, 11; Louisa, 23; Nancy, 17; Mary, 16 — plus Robert, 9, alone on his.

• The Cora's arithmetic — 23 listed, four "not on Board," nineteen landed, and a certificate claiming "28 in number." All three figures stand.

Three entries have no name — two infants known only as their mothers' children, and one name struck through and obliterated. 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 an enslaved artist (Smithsonian National Museum of American History).

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.