I noticed that for each ship manifest listing the slaves being transported, there is a 2nd page showing an affidavit from the owner/shipper which includes the port of departure often indicating the plantation or area where the slaves had worked.  Also included is the ship master’s sworn promise that these slaves were not being brought into the country illegally.  This is because in 1820, Congress passed a stronger law to enforce the illegal importation of slaves from Africa. This one had some teeth to it and made participation in the slave trade an act of piracy and punishable by death.  No doubt that the ship master wanted to do everything he could to avoid that fate!

As example, to the left is a manifest, dated 7 December 1840 (on Roll 08 of the arrivals), indicating the transport of Isabelle Sanders, age 29 and her 6 small children. They were sent from John Weldon, a slave owner in Price William County, VA to G.G. Noel in New Orleans.  This is great information for whoever is lucky enough to have Isabelle or one of her children in their family tree!


To the right is the affidavit page which follows the manifest, indicating that they left the Port of Alexandria, VA in the care of John Graham, Ship Master of the ship Pioneer.

Check out these wonderful new records when you get a chance.  They are already being indexed through Ancestry’s World Archives Project and from what I hear the volunteers are completing in record time!  There appears to be a lot of interest in getting these indexed and available to everyone just as soon as possible!  If you are interested in getting involved with indexing click on this link.

While you are checking out the ship manifests, you may want to hop over to the slave transaction records in the Louisiana Slave Records, 1720-1820 which are already indexed on Ancestry.  These transaction records contain names of over 100,000 slaves living in the state of Louisiana in a 100 year date range, which were collected by Gwen Hall over a 15 year period.  This research was truly an act of love and took Hall to archives in France and Spain to verify the records she found in French and Spanish language Catholic Parish records in Louisiana, as well as in case files in the courthouses of Louisiana. Wow, what amazing details about the slaves in this collection! Not just their names, but their birthplaces in Africa, their slave owners and buyers and the price paid, their skills, general health, personality traits and I have even noticed comments about their degree of rebelliousness for those who were involved in uprisings.  Great background and interesting reading whether they were my ancestors or not!

What did the other kids look like back then? What did people write in the margins to him? Were his old girlfriends in there? Are there pictures from a theatrical performance or sports team he played on? Maybe there is information about an award he won or was he in student government?

Yearbooks are wonderful snapshots from high school or college years that show what our ancestors were like before the struggles and joys of marriage and family began. The youthful exuberance on the faces is often so obvious and sometimes reveals a very different person than the one you know now.

My parents met in high school before the ‘war years’, when he was a junior and she was a sophomore. On their first date which occurred on September 23, 1940, they saw a newly released movie called, “Sun Valley Serenade”, with music by Glenn Miller, and starring Sonja Henie and the dashing John Payne. My mother, who is now a spry 84 year old, says that although John Payne was handsome, she thought this new fellow who asked her out was even more handsome! She still recalls what she wore that night, and until dad passed away 10 years ago, they celebrated their first date in a special way every year for 58 years, even while he served in the US Army Air Corps during WWII.

I am so glad to have the few pictures I have of them as teenagers. We lost their school yearbooks along with most of our cherished photo albums (mother made one every year) as well as the home movies dad took, when our basement flooded during a storm decades ago. I would LOVE to read what they wrote in the margins to each other and see what pictures of them were taken with their friends or while playing on their sports teams.

It is for this reason that I am thrilled with a new initiative soon to be launched at Ancestry.com. We are going to begin expanding our school yearbooks collection by accepting yearbooks from individuals and schools. We will pay for shipping and even have a program for schools that includes a free subscription to Ancestry.com for their library, media center, or computer lab in exchange for yearbooks.

It’s a great idea. And a great use of the wonderful resources at Ancestry. Just think of the great research kids could be doing about their family with the free school subscription. Why don’t you check it out when the program is launched? Maybe your school would like a subscription, or maybe you have some yearbooks you would like to see preserved for generations to come.

I plan to check the collection every so often and see if I luck out – maybe someday a friend of my parents or one of their descendants will submit their yearbooks to the Ancestry U.S. School Yearbooks collection from the classes of ‘42 and ’43 at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania…(hint, hint)!!.

As soon as more information is available about the School Yearbook Collection Project, I will update this blog – so check back here for more information.

Or better yet, send an email to this address if you want us to contact you when the program is launched: yearbooks@ancestry.com.