The greatest disappointment when requesting a historical letter on a gun, be it from the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation (SWHF), Colt Archives or any other lettering service is when the response comes back “No Record Found”.
The key word in that depressingly terse statement is “found”. No one is saying that a record doesn’t exist -somewhere-, they are just saying that no record has been found.
Yet.
I spend an unconscionable amount of spelunking the SWHF archives. It is absolutely not unusual for me to look up one gun, get sidetracked and six hours later I am still rooting through documents and learning the most amazing minutia of Smith & Wesson (S&W) history. Just ask my wife, who knows that when she sees me head towards my desk, I’m going to be off in a different world for several hours despite my statement of “I’ll just be fifteen minutes; I need to run a serial number.”.
When someone asks about a Registered Magnum, they will provide a serial number and the Registration number. Using the serial number provided one looks in the shipping ledger and sees that that particular serial number was a .357 Magnum revolver, the Registration number that was assigned to it, the case (shipping) number, the date shipped and the destination.
All good and useful information. Now we have to see what the configuration was and that is best done by looking at the Order Form and accompanying invoice. To find these, one inputs the Registration number into the Serial Number field of the search feature and, ideally, every gun with that number as part of its serial number will come up.
As you can imagine, if you are looking up RM123 and you type 123 for the serial number search, you’re basically going to get back the phone book because EVERY gun with a serial number containing 123 is going to come back to you (123, 1234, 12345, 123456, 321123, 964123, etc.)
To narrow the field down we can specify only documents dealing with 357 caliber guns by entering 357 in the Caliber search field as well. This greatly thins out the responses.
Still, we must recognize the infallibility of the people who inputted these documents and identified them. Most were not gun people, so to them, any random string of numbers was a serial number. Also, after looking a few thousand pages a day, their ability to discriminate the more subtle nuances of the information they were viewing may have been…lacking.
The result is that sometimes a record will come up as “Record Not Found” when it is in the archive but simply mislabeled.
I’ve been fixing these errors when I find them in the archive and I want to share the process because if you’ve gotten a “Record Not Found” note for Registered Magnum, take hope.
Let us look at an imaginary letter for a real Magnum…
Joe Blow from Podunk, Idaho writes:
“I have a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. It is serial number 54064 on the butt and in the crane it reads REG3032. It is a six-inch barrel and has a red bead front sight. Please tell me everything you can about this gun.” – Imaginary letter
OK, lets grab the most important info: RM3032/#54064.
We pull up the Shipping Ledger and find the following:
The Shipping Ledger confirms that #54064 was assigned Registration number 3032 (leftmost column). Reading from left to right after the serial number, the gun was case (shipping) number 6747, was a 357, shipped on 10-7-37 and went to Dave Cook Co. Denver Colorado.
Off to a great start; we know the numbers are correct and we have a ship date and destination.
Now we have to find the configuration of the gun when it left the factory. That information is most often obtained from the Order Form and Order Invoice.
To find that, we go into the search function and select Caliber 357 and Serial Number 3032 and search.
And we get back…….
Nothing. Squat. Bupkus. Nichevo. No document was found containing the number 3032 AND caliber 357.
Subsequent searches with the serial number instead of the Registration number as well as with and without the Caliber field of 357 also proved fruitless.
One could pull up all documents to and from Cook Brothers that contain 357 and see what they hold:
(I redacted all the serial number data because, hey, that’s how the SWHF keeps the lights on)
Sixty results but the Registration number and serial number of our subject gun is not amongst them. That’s really not surprising, because if they had come up, they would have appeared in the -first- search.
So now what?
We could go to the Shipping Invoices, which are not searchable and are cataloged by date. We would find the batch of invoices for 10/7/1937 and go through all of them until we found one for Cook Brothers that listed RM3032.
That would likely work but it would not give us the guns configuration and, if the gun was ordered by one company but shipped to another, it might not even be listed under Cook Brothers.
There are some other techniques that might shake something loose, but we are pretty much dead ended here.
As I said, I spend a stupid amount of time going through the archives and I started to notice that sometimes an entry for a record will not in any way match the content. In those instances, one sometimes finds things that are lost.
Here is an actual example of how I fix this.
McDonald & Linforth was a huge supplier of Magnums. Statistically, there should be some missing records within their record group.
I fill out the search bar and have the archive pull up every document that is to or from McDonald & Linforth. To accommodate for different spellings and errors (MAC DONALD AND LINFORTH, MACDONALD AND LINFORTH, MCDONALD + LINFORTH, etc.) I’ll search by a key part that is not likely to have been screwed up: Linforth.
1,724 results come up. That is actually not as much as you might think. Some dealers had even more!
Notice the heading Document Type; generally speaking, the documents are separated into Orders, Correspondence, Repair Serials and Miscellaneous. As you can imagine, Orders are where the bread and butter of historical letters is.
Our initial search was for 357 for Caliber and 3032 for Serial Number. Many of the entries on the page are of low probability of being useful for this search because they are a different caliber (38-44, 38) or the entry in the Serial Number field is blank.
However, the entries that have nothing in the serial number field AND nothing in the caliber field are worth investigating.
I started working through these suspect entries and the vast majority are just typical correspondence, but some are quite interesting and provide me fodder for future writing. I work my way down the list to here:
Note the entry labelled:
MISCELLANEOUS and 1937-08-30
The Caliber field and Serial Number field are blank. If this was a gun order, it should have been categorized with ORDER and there would be a caliber listed in the CALIBER field. It would also likely have a serial number listed as well, but not necessarily.
I figure this is an entry worth opening and I do so:
Well look at that!
It’s an Order Invoice for not one but FOUR Registered Magnums!
Let us have a closer look:
This file has the Order Invoice and (not shown) the Order Forms for the following Registered Magnums: RM3032, RM3033, RM3034 and RM 3035! Also note that while the order may have been for Cook Bros., it was placed through McDonald and Linforth and thus, some of the paperwork for these guns will be filed under them!
I had originally ran RM3032 and nothing came back. I also ran, after finding this file, RM3033, 3034 and 3035 and those all came back as “No Record Found” just like RM3032.
So now we have discovered (“found”) the records for FOUR Registered Magnums. Orphans no longer!!!!
So, what happens now? Well, aside from being added to some of my little database projects, this record needs to be corrected. As it is now, the record looks like this:
Document Type: MISCELLANEOUS
OK, that’s wrong.
Calibers: (Blank)
Wrong.
Serial numbers: (Blank)
Wrong again.
A little quick touching up and we have a better record entry:
Document Type: Order
Well, it’s an order! Note that I spelled the word with both upper and lower case letters. This is a little signature I use to show that I changed the record. The records are usually identified in ALL CAPS. If it’s in lower-case, I did it. I can’t sign my work but I can slip in something. 😉
Calibers: 357
DBW’s baby!
Serial Numbers:
3032 54064
3033 54067
3034 54074
3035 54078
Now when we search for a record with 357 as the CALIBER field and 3032 as the SERIAL NUMBER field, we get back this:
Now all four Registered Magnums will come up if searched for under either Registration number or serial number.
I did perhaps a dozen of these last night and I anticipate finding many more.
When I look at my Magnum Opus Project (MAGOPUS) project, this little workaround has helped me fill in many blanks. I have no illusions that I will be able to account for every Registered Magnum made, but I think I am going to come this close –> <–.
In case you’re wondering, this is a labor of love and academic showmanship. I do this on my own time (well actually, on my employers’ time. I work nights, things get slow sometimes) for free.
This is how I support the SWHF, free intensive labor. You? You just have to cough up a little coin and help keep their work going! Did you join yet?
By the way, I’m trying to develop a website that details my research. Wanna pop by and have a look? www.rmvivas.com
Pretty much any research I post on the forum is there too. You can even subscribe and get the new posts straight to your mailbox. Why? Good question; it’s not like I don’t have enough on my plate.
Best,
RM Vivas
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