Finding the Names — Volume One, Installment 38: New Orleans Inward Manifests, 1828 (Roll 5, Images 721–840) — FREE
Installment 38 of Finding the Names — Volume One: The Ship Manifests. The seventh installment of Roll 5 — the 1828 manifests.
791 more entries transcribed name by name from the original New Orleans inward slave manifests — Roll 5, images 721–840, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1895, Records of the U.S. Customs Service (Record Group 36). The series now holds 21,376 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 Jefferson completes — exactly. Her permission says 168 persons; her sheets were filmed across two installments: 55 at the end of the last, 113 here. 168 exactly. Aboard her, Kite, 26, was "not on board," and Joseph Cooper's sheet carried 31 people, 19 of them children.
The Columbia's missing number — her oath, permission, and inspector all say 194 people; her sheets list 193, because the clerk's numbering skips No. 47. No person is missing; only a number is. Two of her people are crossed out: Phillip, 19 — "Died 9th November"; James, 45 — "Died 7th November."•
The Lafayette's birth and death — her master's oath reports "except One death & one birth." The death is named: Stephen Jackson, 21. The newborn is named on no sheet — it exists only in the oath.•
Seven left in Mobile — seven of Eaton's 61 on the steamboat Marietta are pencilled "left in Mobile," which is exactly why the inspector counted only "fifty four Slaves." Her sheet's tail is a run of babies: Robert at 18 months, Dinah at 1, Susan at 4 months.•
The family that went out and came back — Rachel, classed "Griffonne," with Myrda, Lick, Celestine, and baby Pierre: shipped to the Bay of St. Louis in August, and the return endorsement shows all five brought back and inspected in December.•
Two entries have no name — one washed out of its sheet, one under a dark ink blot; both are printed with everything that survives. 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 — "Dave the Potter," enslaved in South Carolina, inscribed his own verse in clay meant to outlast him (Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0).
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.