Dashboard in Tableau showing some of the major visualizations for this data. While this is a static image, the Tableau data on Tableau Public is interactive, allowing for users to click on, mouse over, and scroll through the data to get additional data points.
NOLA Slave Manifests Data 1818-1821, Ships and Shippers via Flourish
NOLA Slave Manifests Data 1818-1821, Ships and Shippers via Flourish
The most critical aspect of the research is making sure that the data points retain their humanity. The center and heart of this data are not the ships or the shippers, but the enslaved persons who appear on the manifests. Not every visualization and method of analysis in this study will use the names of the enslaved as its primary metric, but there are many that do, and those are where the true stories of people will be found.
Despite the records purportedly from 1807-1860, searching by year does not actually produce results until 1818, where there are 35 records. It is most likely that these records do in fact exist, however, they have not been digitized by Ancestry users via the crowdsourcing data digitization tool, Keying Tool.
Additionally, while it may be acceptable to look at a selection of a larger dataset for a single year, it is not possible to determine how large a sample is relative to the total number of true records for a given year because that number cannot be known. As a result, comparing the year-to-year Ancestry records presents a potential struggle because one year's Ancestry records may show 15% of the total records while another year may be 75%.
The potential years of this dataset are 1808-1860. Data is only available from 1818-1857 and 1859-1860. Finally, my research will explore an even further subset of these years, 1818-1821.
This graph represents the number of records that appear by year in the Ancestry record base from 1807-1860.
The Ancestry database's lack of records before 1818 is corroborated by the lack of narratively digitized manifest records from AfriGeanas. Additionally, the notation for Roll 1 of the manifests and summarization of the records in the National Archives states that there are "none" for 1808-1818 as well as 1858. Therefore the lack of records in Ancestry is not due to the presence of the record by a lack of digitization. This leaves one of two options, either a lack of records or destruction of records, with the latter being the most likely given that New Orleans was a large slave market during the early 19th century.
Interestingly, the National Archives notes 1836 as the peak for the slave trade, though based on these records, 1836 is one of three dramatically high years in terms of inbound enslaved peoples into New Orleans, of which 1836 is the lowest. This might be interpreted to say that 1836 was the last of the years with high numbers, but may also point to the entire corpus of records from 1836 not yet having been digitized and therefore not represented in Ancestry's and thus this graph's data.
This is further explored in the Appendix.