Finding the Names — Installment 57 (Roll 7: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1835) — 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 57 — Roll 7, images 721–840 transcribed name by name by hand: 617 more entries (612 named, 5 unnamed) on 64 manifests, 157 pages. The series now holds 35,889 transcribed entries. A filming divider at image 788 opens the "Oct.–Dec. 1835" section.

One page in this installment is not like the others. The ship Hyperion's manifest is a slave-manifest form whose printed purpose clause has been struck through and rewritten by hand: William, 35, is entered as a free person of color, a resident of New Orleans where his family resides, "now on his Return to New Orleans, having come here with two of W. North's Children of New Orleans, as their Servant, having left them here at School." The oath is altered the same way — he is not held to service or labor as a slave — and the Baltimore certificate strikes the word "Slaves" and substitutes "person of Color." He is printed here as the record carries him: a free man travelling home on a slave ship's paperwork.

The brig Ariel's 127 reconcile exactly with her Norfolk permission — a count that only works because of one entry lying largely hidden under her sheet's overlapping fold, given an unnamed row here. The brig Virginia's permission says "92 Slaves" against 93 numbered entries and a child carried on her mother's line; her Balize endorsement reports "one Man on board Peter, Fifty Years of Age — not on the List & one Dead in Zelman [?]." That Peter was found by the same examiner, Wm B. Taylor, on the same day — 18 April 1835 — as the Peter of Petersburg whose certificate stands in Installment 56. They may be the same man; the papers do not say so, and this book prints the cross-reference without claiming it.

Smaller disagreements, kept as written: the brig Favorite's table names 12 people, her Savannah certificate "Four Males and Twelve Female Slaves"; the steam boat Chattahoochee's table lists four, her certificate "three in number"; a child was born on the passage of the brig Tribune — on no manifest line, recorded only in the boarding officer's endorsement. And the brig America carries seven separate shippers' manifests for a single sailing, every one of their counts agreeing. Charlotte of the schooner Elmina Rogers "answers the name of Charity"; and on the ship Shakespeare, the single entry's name was first written "Jacob Wiley," struck through, and replaced with Betty.

Includes a searchable CSV name list of all 617 entries (name, vessel, age, shipper, and more). Honest about gaps: illegible and conflicting entries are flagged, never silently fixed.

With Installments 1–57 the series now holds 35,889 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