Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 28: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1826–1827 (Roll 4, Images 241–360) — FREE

Installment 28 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests.

557 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 4, images 241–360, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 15,177 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 Governor Strong's hidden three — her manifest names 82, but her arrival oath admits "one Birth & two Children omitted": Mary, 16, "had a child born on the passage," and Milley "has two small infants, which are not on the list." Eighty-five people arrived.

• "They are not Slaves for life" — Inspector Bright's certificate on the Arctic records that Delia and Harriet said exactly that, and adds: "there is also a negro Boy on board, named James, not in this list, who says that he is free."

• The exception written into the oath — on Kelso's Hibernia filing, Phillis, Val, and Charles are hand-excepted from the term-service clause denying freedom after a term; on the face of the paper, they are entitled to freedom when their term runs out.

• Joe — a man who exists in the record only because the Richmond inspector certified he was measured aboard the Hope and Polly but "omitted to be cleared out on the manifest."

• Children alone — Eliza Cox, 12, with a manifest entirely to herself; Ann, "Twelve," alone ("Permit the above child to be landed"); Carlotta, 12; Jack, 10; Gidea, 11.

• Bound for Natchez — the Hibernia's ten, their destination rewritten by hand: "to be here shipped on board a Steam boat for Natchez."

• Nancy, 15 — the word "dead" pencilled beside her name on the James Monroe's big 1827 filing.

Five entries have no name — two erased beyond reading, two blotted out, and a child born on the Jefferson's passage who is on no table. 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 David Drake's signed poem jar of 1858 — 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.