Finding the Names — Installment 55 (Roll 7: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1834–1835) — 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 55 — Roll 7, images 481–600 transcribed name by name by hand: 714 more entries (706 named, 8 unnamed) on 60 manifests, 169 pages. The series now holds 33,464 transcribed entries. The filming itself changes rolls inside this installment: image 520 is the "ROLL 10 — END" target and image 523 the title sheet of old Roll 11, "Inward Slave Manifests 1835–1836" — the archives built this roll from two older ones, and from image 525 the papers are 1835's.

The brig Orion out of Richmond carries this installment's hardest arithmetic. Her table is numbered to 128 entries — 130 people, counting two "& child" lines — but her certificate says 119; her Balize endorsement permits 64 of one consignment to land; and a New Orleans inspector counted only 44 on board. Four official numbers, and no two of them agree; all four are printed, and the names stand as the table gives them. The same examination names a man her table does not: George, "the Servant of a Gentleman Passenger on board — who omitted putting his Servant on the Manifest accidentally."

The brig Eliza Davidson's table, spread across three sheets, names 120 people (one, Polly, struck through in full) against her Wilmington clearance's "One hundred & Eighteen" slaves "& one since added." And as so often in these rolls, the examiners hand people their names back: on the brig Everett, "Isaac is called Israel" and "Joe is called Tom"; George of the schooner Paramount is described Yellow on his manifest and found Black in person; Thornton of the Everett stands on the table but was not on board at either examination; and the schooner Ajax's last three — John, Tom, and Lucy — were "not on board by some mistake" at the Balize, though New Orleans excepted only Tom and Lucy.

Small things, kept as written: the schooner Emblem's 44 names with five struck through, her certificate's "thirty nine" being exactly what remains; an Everett sheet entering men as "Jack or Simon," "Henry or Ben," "Peter or Sam"; the brig Atlantic's children whose stature is entered only as "uncertain"; two men both named Scipio on the steam ship Connecticut, 26 and 22, under one shipper; Richard of the Orion, whose age is written as the fraction "¼"; and Anthony of the Stranger, 15 years old and 6 ft 2 in tall.

Includes a searchable CSV name list of all 714 entries (name, vessel, age, shipper, and more). Honest about gaps: illegible and conflicting entries are flagged, never silently fixed.

With Installments 1–55 the series now holds 33,464 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