New Orleans Passenger Lists missing from May & June 1856

tyams

There's something strange about the New Orleans passenger lists from May and June 1856, which can be partly explained by an insert in New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820-1945 (NARA Series M259, Roll 43) indicating the manifests from June 1856 are "missing, except for one list" and a similar insert in Quarterly Abstracts of Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New Orleans, 1820-1875 (NARA Series M272, Roll 12) indicating the quarterly abstracts from Jan 1855-Mar 1857 are entirely missing.

However, I've found index cards for several passenger arrivals from May and June 1856 in the Index to New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1853-1952, which indicate a specific ship and date and arrival, for which no passenger lists exist in the collections above (as confirmed by wildcard searches and visually skimming through the images). For some specific examples:

• Gustav Schaefer, arrived 5 May 1856 aboard the Bremen, which the Bremen Archives indicate departed Bremen on 25 Mar and arrived at New Orleans on 12 May 1856 with 351 passengers.
• Heinrich Steinborn, arrived 13 May 1856 aboard the D H Watjen, which the Bremen Archives indicate departed Bremen on 25 Mar 1856 and arrived at New Orleans on 14 May 1856 with 309 passengers.

Do the original New Orleans arrival manifests still exist somewhere, even though they weren't imaged in the broader NARA collections? If not, is there a way to isolate the passenger index cards from May/Jun 1856 and essentially reconstruct the passenger manifests? It would be very helpful in supporting a project I'm working on. Unfortunately, all of the index cards from 1853-1899 were organized alphabetically by passenger surname, and neither the ship name nor the exact arrival date appears to have been indexed, which makes it difficult to quickly identify extended family groups who may have been traveling together but with assorted surnames. My search of New Orleans index cards from 1856 yielded nearly 10,000 results (though this includes passengers who arrived from late 1855 through 1856, not just May-June 1856, so many of them have existing manifests) and there's no way I feel like visually inspecting 10,000 images!

tyams

Since the cards are quite uniform in size and content and the text is TYPED IN ALL CAPS, this seems like a great use for OCR if I knew who to contact about obtaining permission to download those images and OCR them.

SerraNola

@tyams DGS Film #

 4882472

tyams

@SerraNola Can you clarify what you mean by that? I've looked at that roll of microfilm and the manifests I mentioned were not filmed on it. One small caveat: I mixed up the passenger info in the original post and seem to be unable to edit it. The manifests I'm searching for should contain:

• Heinrich Steinborn, arrived 13 May 1856 aboard the Bremen, which the Bremen Archives indicate departed Bremen on 25 Mar and arrived at New Orleans on 12 May 1856 with 351 passengers.
• Gustav Schafer, arrived 16 May 1856 aboard the D H Wätjen, which the Bremen Archives indicate departed Bremen on 25 Mar 1856 and arrived at New Orleans on 14 May 1856 with 309 passengers.

However, only one manifest was filmed on NARA M259 roll 43 / FHL 200183 / DGS 4882472 as arriving between 12 May 1856 and 21 May 1856 (the New World arrived on May 13 with just a single passenger).

SerraNola

@tyams You are so right! I didn't look at the film and didn't realize it was the same one you referenced in your post. I didn't do any research, just found the link at this site. It does seem that the manifests must have existed when the index cards were made.