About Oceans of Kinfolk
By Jennie K. Williams, Ph.D.
— Interview of a formerly enslaved woman named Anna King, c. 1933.
Overview
Oceans of Kinfolk is a database, built by Kinfolkology Co-Founder Jennie K. Williams, of the coastwise traffic of enslaved people in the antebellum United States. The first edition of Oceans of Kinfolk includes the names of more than 63,000 enslaved men, women and children trafficked to New Orleans from domestic ports between 1818 and 1860. Dr. Williams is currently revising that edition in order to add missing transcriptions, correct previous mistakes, and insert images of the original documents into the manifest. This process requires careful, manual review of every single record, and so it will take some time to complete. Once each record is reviewed, it is added to this page, the Second Edition of Oceans of Kinfolk.
Image: Manifest of the schooner Orleans, Mobile to New Orleans, 3 March, 1828.
Oceans of Kinfolk’s role in Kinfolkology’s Origins
Where does the data of Oceans of Kinfolk come from?
While manifests from different ports have varying structures, most include the same basic information. The record below documents the forced transport of nine captives from Savannah to Charleston aboard the steamboat John David Morgan in February of 1831. The heading (highlighted in light blue) identifies the vessel type (steamboat), vessel tonnage (169) and vessel name (John D. Morgan), as well as the port of departure (Charleston) and arrival (Savannah). On most manifests, the heading also includes the name of the captain of the vessel. The column to the far left (dark blue) lists the names of the captives. The next column (red) identifies each captive’s sex; quotation marks or the word “ditto” (or “do”) indicate the answer is the same as the one given for the preceding captive. Captives’ ages are listed in the third column (purple), followed by their heights (green). Column five (pink) is a subjective assessment of each captive’s skin tone. The columns to the far right includes the names and locations of the captives’ “owner,” “shipper,” and/or “consigner.” The notation on the lower right corner (white) gives the date of departure and the name of the captain. See the section below (“Understanding the Variables of Oceans of Kinfolk”) to learn more about how information from manifests became the variables of Oceans of Kinfolk.
Understanding the Variables of Oceans of Kinfolk
ID_OOK
Each enslaved person in the Oceans of Kinfolk database is assigned a six-digit unique ID. This is a necessity because many names appear more than once in the dataset. For example, there are more than 400 enslaved men named “Moses” in Oceans of Kinfolk.
Name_Enslaved
Virtually all manifests include at least a first name for every enslaved person listed, excluding some infants, but last names appear most frequently on manifests of voyages from Virginia and Maryland. Fifty-seven percent of enslaved people trafficked by sea from Virginia and Maryland to New Orleans were identified by both first and last names, while only two percent of enslaved people trafficked from other ports were identified by both names. This disparity may be related to the fact that voyages from Virginia and Maryland tended carry far more enslaved people (66 on average) than those from other ports (7 enslaved people on average), meaning that the likelihood of two or more captives having the same first name was greatest on voyages from Virginia and Maryland.
Source
This field specifies the document (manifest) on which each enslaved person’s name and description appear. (Every manifest used to construct Oceans of Kinfolk was assigned a unique six-digit ID.) All entries in this field are hyperlinks to pages displaying PDFs of the original documents.
Alt_Name_Enslaved
This variable is used when enslaved people are identified by an “alias” or alternate name on the manifest.
Sex_Enslaved
Manifests typically indicated the sex of each enslaved person excluding infants.
Age_Enslaved
Most manifests listed the age of each enslaved person excluding infants whose “ages” were typically listed as “infant.” In order for infants’ ages to be legible for quantitative analysis, infants’ ages were imputed as “0.” All ages were imputed as whole numbers, as “0,” or—if ages were not provided or were illegible—left blank.
Stature_Enslaved
While manifests listed heights in feet and inches, heights were imputed into Oceans of Kinfolk in inches only. For example, Oceans of Kinfolk lists the heights of all enslaved people described on manifests as 5’ 2” as 62 (inches).
Racial_Descriptor_Enslaved
Manifests included racial descriptors of virtually all coastwise captives. The terms listed in this field are offensive and harmful but were nonetheless imputed verbatim so as to avoid adding another layer of subjectivity (that of the individual encoding the data) to the construction of race. In addition, such descriptors often provide clues to genealogical researchers attempting to confirm ancestors’ identities based upon their descriptions on other sources.
Relational_Type_1 (& Relational_Type_2, Relational_Type_3, etc.)
This specifies an enslaved person’s relationship, when known, to another enslaved person listed on the same manifest.
Relational_ID_1 (& Relational_ID_2, Relational_ID_3, etc.)
This is the ID_OOK of the person to whom Relational_Type_1 (or 2 or 3) refers.
Voyage_ID
All voyages are assigned a unique six-digit ID.
Voyage_Year
This is the year of each voyage’s departure with captives on board.
Vessel_Type
This is the type of the vessel (brig, schooner, ship, etc.).
Vessel_Name
This is the name of the vessel.
Vessel_Home
This is the vessel’s home port.
Vessel_Tonnage
This is the vessel’s tonnage.
Name_Captain
This is the name of the captain or master of the vessel.
Port of Embarkation
This is the location of embarkation of the captives.
Port of Disembarkation
This is the location where enslaved people disembarked the vessel.
Unknown_Role_Enslaver_1 (& Unknown_Role_Enslaver_2 & Unknown_Role_Enslaver_3)
These fields are used when an enslaver is listed on a manifest but the document does not indicate whether the enslaver was an “owner,” “shipper,” or “consignor.”
Unknown_Role_Enslaver_Location_1 (& Unknown_Role_Enslaver_2_Location & Unknown_Role_Enslaver_3_Location)
This is the location or place of residence given for enslavers who are not specified as “owners,” “shippers,” or “consignors.”
Owner_1 & Owner_2, Shipper_1 & Shipper_2, and Consignor_1 & Consignor_2
These terms are offensive and harmful in that they refer to human beings as commodities. They are used in the database (instead of, for example, replacing all three with the term “enslaver”) because they often provide clues about enslaved people’s experiences. For example, on this manifest of the brig Orbit, Joseph B. Woolfolk is identified as the “owner” and “shipper,” while Samuel Woolfolk is listed as the consigner. This helped Jennie K. Williams locate information about what happened to the little girl listed last on this document, eight-year-old Betsey, after her arrival in New Orleans. When looking through records of sale of enslaved people in New Orleans—which are indexed by buyers and seller—Williams knew to look for sales of enslaved people by Samuel Woolfolk. This led her to discover the record of the sale of Betsey to Emanuel Prudhomme of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. This, in turn, enabled Dr. Williams to learn more about Betsey’s life in Louisiana.
Owner_1_Location & Owner_2_Location, Shipper_1_Location & Shipper_2_Location, and Consignor_1_Location & Consignor_2_Location
These fields refer to the location or place of residence given for each enslaver identified on a manifest.
Date_Manifest
This is the date on which the manifest was drafted. In some cases, manifests were drafted the same day of the vessel’s departure. In other cases, manifests were drafted one to three days prior to departure.
Date_Inspection_1 & Date_Inspection_2
Enslaved people were physically inspected and compared to their descriptions on manifests prior to disembarkation. This variable refers to the dates of those inspections.
Location_Inspection_1 & Location_Inspection_2
Sometimes enslaved people were “inspected” at ports preceding the final port of disembarkation. For example, many enslaved people who were trafficked to New Orleans were inspected by customs officials at the port of Balize.
Landed_Date
This refers to the date the vessel was “landed” and captives were disembarked.
ID_LK
If an enslaved person also appears in Louisiana Kindred, their Louisiana Kindred ID appears here. This links the two databases.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why were manifests drafted?
Manifests were legally mandated by the 1807 “Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves” which outlawed the nation’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. The Act required any captain of a coastwise vessel with enslaved people onboard to file a manifest, at both the port of departure and of the port of arrival, listing the captives by name and description and swearing that they had not been illegally trafficked from Africa after the ban. As a result, the coastwise traffic was systematically documented, and in this way, differs from both its historical precedent, the transatlantic slave trade, and its contemporary counterpart, the overland domestic trade.
Why were the enslaved people listed on manifests being forcibly transported from one place to another?
The forced relocations of enslaved people accounted for the bulk of the coastwise traffic. Most had been purchased in the Upper South and were being sent by traders to New Orleans, where they could be resold at a profit. Enslaved people being forced to relocate along with migrant enslavers represented the second largest portion of the coastwise traffic. In effect, for most of the individuals listed on manifests, the voyage experience represented a moment of rupture and uprooting. For others, however, travel by sea was likely a disruptive but familiar aspect of life in bondage. Many enslaved people were sent back and forth between their enslavers’ multiple plantations. Others were put to work building canals and other public works on behalf of state governments, first in one place and then another. And still others were hired out by their enslavers over vast distances, and then sent back at the completion of the contract. In short, the coastwise traffic encompassed a multitude of experiences. Read more about the history of the coastwise traffic here.
How many manifests are there?
At present, Oceans of Kinfolk includes information from approximately 4,000 manifests. Those records, however, represent only the coastwise traffic to New Orleans. There was also a significant traffic out of New Orleans. Other significant coastwise traffics included those from Charleston to Savannah and from New Orleans to points west, especially Mobile and, beginning in the 1830s, various ports in Texas. In total, there may be as many as 20,000 extant manifests from the the coastwise traffic. The Kinfolkology team is currently at work examining each of these records and incorporating them into the Oceans of Kinfolk database.
Do most manifests survive? How many have been lost or destroyed?
This is impossible to answer definitively or with precision. However, manifests appear to be a relatively comprehensive representation of the coastwise traffic. In other words, most manifests appear to have survived to the present.