This project as digitized a large amount of the manifest data, however, it is formatted as a transcription, not as a spreadsheet.
For each of these sources it would still be necessary to transcribe the data from the original format to a spreadsheet.
This project as digitized a large amount of the manifest data, however, it is formatted as a transcription, not as a spreadsheet.
Ancestry.com has access to the slave manifests for New Orleans from 1808-1860 to those who are subscribers to Ancestry, which as luck would have it, I am.
However, there is no access to a spreadsheet of the digitized data through the search functions. I can search by keywords such as year, name, or age to view the results in a list and click on specific records for more details.
An image of one page of the manifest document - this one page contains data for one ship on one date with 5 enslaved people on board
Because I cannot download the search results, I must copy/paste them into a spreadsheet from the search results list. This is a manual process and also limits the data I can collect for analysis to those few fields that appear in the results list.
Searching the Ancestry database is most efficiently done for this project by using only the year.
One year, 1819 for example, has 1430 records, and at 50 results per page it is an arduous process to get one year of data
Searching for 1819 exactly produced 1819 results only and its 1430 results.
Data is at the mercy of the public transcription process and therefore duplications and mistranslations are possible. For example, there are records where John A Appleseed and John Andrew Appleseed are likely the same people because they have enslaved people inbound on the same ship on the same day, but because one has a middle name and another has a middle initial only, they appear differently in analysis.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/9742c1a8-40bd-455b-bb40-a9f6225a4278/Screen_Recording_2021-04-12_at_4.51.26_PM.mp4