08 September 2012

Too Much Manifest and Not Enough Month

I was afraid I was dreaming. Apparently I was not. (click on images to view them fully--original sizes overwhelmed the page)

The Baltimore, Maryland, passenger lists for 1853 contain a reference to my ancestor and his family. I was happy to have found it. The problem is that  Ancestry.com  apparently did not include the "cover sheet" as an image in their set of images.I'm not certain how often this happened, but a quick look at a few other months of images from 1853 indicated that the first image from each month was the first sheet of the manifest, not the "cover sheet" for the list as discussed below. 

The first image shows part of the manifest image for the Post which arrived in Baltimore in July of 1853. You can see in the image that this image is number 6 of 42 from July of 1853. This is the first image appearing from the microfilm for this ship's list. 


 The image previous to 6 (image 5) is shown below. It contains the "cover sheet" for the manifest, which includes the name of the ship, the port of embarking and other details. 
 This is image 4 from the July of 1853 entries which is the entry I actually wanted. It is from a different ship--the Beta which arrived before the Post.
 Image 1 though is just the first page of the entries for the Beta. It does not contain the "cover sheet" for the Beta.

I did find the "cover sheet" for the Beta. It was contained at the end of the images for June of 1853--image 103 of 104.
Image 104 of the June 1853 images contains the statement of authenticity for the manifest.

It appears that the images were hopefully completely digitized. But if what you are searching for is at the beginning of the month--try the end of the previous month. Apparently Ancestry.com  didn't quite get the end of the month quite right in some cases. 

Which is sort of like too much month and not enough money. Or something like that (grin).