As most of you know, for more than 30
years SRS has been going through official records in the National Archives and
other original source records to find military small arms serial numbers and
noting the documents that list them. The serial numbers and sometimes other
significant data about the arms have been published in
our serial number books and the serial numbers have also been posted in a
database on this web site. This article describes the process SRS goes through
to provide a collector with a letter on a specific weapon, citing the specific
source(s), a summary of the known information on that weapon, and, where
available, a copy of the original documentation on a firearm that is listed in
the SRS database. We hope this information will be useful for those of you
considering doing your own military history research. It’s something I
personally enjoy and think many of you will as well.
From the research process standpoint
there are two categories of SRS provenance letters:
-
Documentation letters based on record copies we hold, including a limited
number of DCM sales records, military disposal records, and Sharps shipping
records. These sale and shipping records represent only a small portion of the
database and they will not be addressed here.
- Documentation letters based on records held
by the National Archives and other record repositories. This article is focused on this category of
SRS letters and reflects the vast majority of the data in the SRS database.
The National Archives "Old Army-Navy" Records
Getting
to the
Archives
Building
and Checking In
Source documents vary greatly and do so
especially based on the period of history involved. The National Archives has
two facilities in the D.C. area. The downtown facility has most of the older
records and the
College Park
,
MD
, facility has most records for
post World War I. We will begin with research at the downtown D.C. facility and
for the purpose of illustrating the SRS process I have chosen a typical request
for a Civil War provenance letter – a Remington New Model Army revolver that
according to the SRS database was in the 22nd Pennsylvania Cavalry in March
1864.
I typically get notification of a
request for research through an email from the web site or a letter through the
U.S.
mail. My first action is to look up the source documentation citation (more on
that later). I then check various notes on these sources that Frank Mallory
and/or I have made as well as documents on the sources published by the
National Archives. I then plan a trip to the Archives to review (and if
possible copy) the original documents. Due to the cost and time required to
visit the Archives I need to have at least two requests for letters to justify
a trip. For some of the same reasons, if you are planning to do research at the
Archives for the first timeyou should plan a multiple-day visit for, as you
will see below, you probably won’t get much done on the first day.
The first problem is just getting
there. For me the trip downtown is an hour each way in rush hour traffic if I
drive, or an hour and 20 minutes by bus and Metro. If you visit from out of
town I would recommend staying somewhere near a Metro stop. If you decide to drive, the next challenge you will face after the rush hour
traffic is finding parking in D.C. It’s very expensive but some is available
reasonably near the Archives if you get there early enough. Then it’s a walk to
the back of the Archives building (the entry for researchers) and security
processing (metal scanner, signing in, getting a property pass for any
electronic devices like a laptop, etc.). The hours of operation have recently
been reduced and access isn’t permitted until 9:00 AM. I already have a researcher’s identification
badge (which you need for access to the reading room), and after getting an
additional visitor’s badge I go to the research assistance room to request the
documents I need to see. If you do not have a researcher’s badge you have to
first get a photo id made.
After
Arriving at the Archives- Getting started
After signing in at the research
assistance room the next step is to fill out and submit “pull requests” for the
documents. If you know exactly what is required to fill out this form it is a
simple matter of filling it out and giving it to the archivist to get it in for
the next scheduled pull. However, only
four pulls are done per day and you are allowed to submit requests for only one
record group at a time (more on record groups below). The Archives buildings
close at 5:00 PM and given the limited hours I usually can take advantage of
only three of these pulls, which means I can only get a maximum of three
different types of documents per visit to the Archives. The first pull is at
10:00 AM and the others are at 11:00 AM, 1:30 PM and 2:30 PM. It takes the
staff an hour to two hours to pull records so plan accordingly. On the first
day of your visit it is unlikely you will actually see any paper records until
11:30 or later (but see the discussion of microfilm records below). The last
pull obviously provides little time that day to find what you’re looking for
and is useful primarily for obtaining records to review the following day.
The information required for the
pull slip is your name and researcher number, the date, the record group
identification, the “entry” number and the descriptive title of the entry and
some more specific reference that will enable the staff to find records that
are likely to be of some value to you. At the highest level records are
arranged in “record groups.” As examples, records of the Army Chief of Ordnance
are in Record Group (RG) 156, records of the Army Continental Commands are in
RG 393 and records of the Naval Bureau of Ordnance are in RG 74. According to
the notes made during previous SRS research when we originally found it, the
source of the serial number for our Remington pistol is in the Civil War
volunteer regiments’ “Regimental Books” stored in RG 94, records of the Army
Adjutant General. RG 94 is a very large record group but in this example we are
dealing with a specific and fairly small subgroup, Entry 112, the regimental
books for volunteer organizations in the Civil War (Spanish-American War books
are in Entry 116 of RG 94). When volunteer regiments were mustered into federal
service they were issued these ledgers and after the regiments were mustered
out of federal service the ledgers remained federal property. These books are
the official records of the regiment while in federal service and consist of up
to fifteen volumes and may include orders, letters received, letters sent,
guard rosters, personnel descriptive records, etc.
Being fairly familiar with the
Regimental Books, I know to go to a certain box in the research assistance room
to see if the specific volume of the 22nd PA Cavalry’s records that I need to
see can be pulled. If I can get the specific volume identified there is a
chance that I can get only that volume pulled. The individual books of some
regiments are separately identified in the “location register” box and others
are not. If the individual volume I need is not listed the Archives staff will
pull all of the books for the regiment – which often means they will be the
only documents they bring me for this pull and I will get nothing else done for
the next three-four hours. If you do not know the specific records you need
pulled you have to discuss your research task with the archivist, which usually
means waiting since only one is on duty for each major grouping of records
(Army, Navy, Civil). Spending some time on the Archives web site prior to your
visit may help speed your search for if you are not well prepared it’s unlikely
you will see records until the afternoon.
Finally,
Records to use!
Once you have submitted your pull
request you go to the beautiful old second floor reading room to wait for your
records. For security reasons your photo id is used to gain access to this room
and you cannot take with you bags, coats, ballpoint pins or original documents.
The Archives provides pencils and paper for your use. The guards and staff use
video surveillance cameras to monitor researchers to prevent theft and damage
to the documents. You can take only one folder out of a box at a time and you
must also use a marker in the box to ensure the folder is replaced in its
proper sequence. There are numerous other rules as well, all of which are
clearly appropriate if you understand the staff’s concerns.
If the records you requested are
more than a single small box or volume they will be taken to a short-term
storage room on a cart and the staff of the reading room will have to retrieve
them for you (this is another sometimes frustrating delay). In this case let’s
say that I was able to identify and get pulled the specific volume I needed to
look at – the Descriptive Book for Companies F through L, 22nd PA Volunteer
Cavalry – and that volume was brought directly to the reading room. Since the
staff knows me well, they will often advise me when my records have arrived.
Otherwise you have to check in with them periodically. In this case, the best
possible situation, the staff tells me my records have arrived, I sign for
them, and they hand me a book about 14 x 24 inches in size and 2-3 inches thick
that is usually falling apart and very dirty. Approximately four hours have
passed since I left home for the Archives. Again, this is the best-case
situation. In one out of four cases there is a problem of some sort such as the
wrong records being pulled – for example, the 22nd PA Infantry records might
have been brought instead of the 22nd PA Cavalry. Other frequently encountered
problems are other researchers having checked out the records I want to see,
the records have been misfiled or temporarily lost, or, most irritating, the
Archives staff have re-boxed or reorganized the records and they are no longer
where our notes say we originally found them. Mistakes on my part in properly
filling out the pull slip are not at all uncommon either. When any one of these
problems occurs you have lost not only the time you’ve spent but also the time
it will take to correct the problem. While most of the Archives folks are very
conscientious they are understaffed and can’t quickly correct such mistakes as
bringing the wrong records even if the mistake was theirs.
In this case I received the proper
document and can begin the search for my client’s serial number. Serial numbers
are where you find them in these records. Unfortunately there was no set system
for maintaining the serial numbers of weapons assigned to individual soldiers
at this time. The serial numbers may be in a list of names and numbers
specifically made for the purpose or they may be annotations in an existing
list of soldier names (the “Descriptive” list described below, a guard roster,
etc.). In other cases the serial numbers are scattered throughout a given
volume or in multiple volumes. For example, an entry noting a soldier deserted and
took his weapon with him might include the serial number. In most such cases
the serial number notation may be in a section listing deserters but it may
also be in the section providing individual soldier descriptions as a note
beside the soldier’s entry. It was just an impossible task for us to always be
very specific in our SRS records in noting where we found a given serial
number. About the best we could do was to note the record group, entry, and
file number or volume number (depending on the type of records). In this case
my research notes showed the serial number was in the Descriptive Book for
Companies F- L of the 22nd PA. These books have a section for each company so
logically I go to the section for Company L. The serial numbers may be anywhere
in that section of approximately 40-50 pages but, unfortunately, they may be
elsewhere in the book as well. The Descriptive Book was a record kept by each
company that included a brief description of each soldier (in case of his
death, desertion, etc.), his term and place of enlistment, and often a notation
of the clothing and other items he was issued. In some cases, this being one of
them, the weapon(s) he was issued may be entered near his name. As noted above,
in other cases there is a separate, simple list of soldier names and the serial
numbers of the arms they were issued. Often in such lists only last names are
given and in most cases the writing is very poor, the document faded and dirty
and difficult to read. It usually takes a half hour or more to find the serial
number I’m looking for if I have this much information to aid my search. After
I have verified the exact serial number is actually there (ensuring that it was
transcribed correctly in our notes and subsequently entered correctly in our published
or on line database) I have enough evidence to confirm that a specific weapon
was indeed used by that unit. In some
cases the number may be from a general list for an entire company without
individual names, but often a weapon is identified to a specific name. At that point, I make a tentative
identification of the soldier. When the numbers are in regimental books other
than the Descriptive Book and only the soldier’s last name is given, I may have
to then pull the Descriptive book also to make a preliminary identification.
Getting
a Civil War Soldier’s Service Record
I next go to the microfilm room and
pull the microfilm roll for the index of names of soldiers who served from
Pennsylvania
to get a
positive identification of the soldier. This gives me the spelling of the name
used by the Adjutant General (AG) to file his compiled service record. A
soldier’s name is often spelled differently in different places in the same
document so I have to determine what spelling the AG used in compiling his
record.
The next step is to put in a pull
request for the soldier’s record, wait for it to arrive in the reading room,
and make a copy for my client. This is another two-three hour process so I try
to have other work I can do while waiting for the records to be retrieved. This
is something I would strongly suggest you do as well. If you have a long wait
you might make use of the microfilm records discussed below.
If the records containing my
client’s serial number are in a loose document and they are not too fragile to
be photocopied, I will make a copy for the SRS letter. The reproduction
procedure requires that you first show the staff the documents to be copied and
get their permission to copy them. If there are staples that must be removed
(and they are willing to allow them to be removed) they have to do it. There
are only four copiers at the Archives and often one must wait for a copier to
become available. Five-minute waits for five minutes on the machine are common
in busy periods. Copies are 15 cents a page and the paper used is a large,
non-standard size. You must use a sometimes-troublesome magnetic strip card for
the machines (available from the cashier’s office on the 1st floor).
Leaving
the Archives
The trip home is the reverse of the
trip to the Archives. You first have to go through security as you leave the
reading room. This sometimes means waiting in line while the guard laboriously
fingers through each page of every person’s documents making sure they all show
evidence of having been made on the Archives’ copier and that no originals are
included. You also go through a similar process as you leave the building.
Recently a few people, some quite prominent, have been caught stealing
documents and these inconveniences are just a fact of life.
More
Work Involved With the SRS Letter
Once I’m home I start to prepare the
letter for my client. In most cases these Civil War records containing serial
numbers do not specifically identify the make or model arm issued to the
soldier. The usual notation is “carbine” or “pistol.” If there is any question
as to the type of arm issued my next step is to review documents describing the
arms issued to the regiment. In many cases I can do that through quarterly
reports (“returns”) that the regiments made on the ordnance they had on hand.
These ordnance returns are available in the National Archives on microfilm.
However, the reports were not always made or retained if they were made at all.
If there are no returns that verify the types of arms issued another research
effort is required (see the October 2006 Gun Report article I did on the
“pistol carbines” of the 11th New York Cavalry for an example). In this case
the records specifically stated that pistol number 58545, which was issued to
Private Scott Hann, was a “Remington Army Pistol.”
Finding
out More About the Unit
If information is to be added about the
activities of the unit identified with a specific weapon during the period
involved, the next step is to find a regimental history of the unit. This sort of research is fairly
straightforward and I will not elaborate further on this part of the research
effort. Now, finally having everything
that I will include with this particular letter, I take the time to review the
information uncovered by all of the research and write the letter. All that is
left after that is business book keeping and packaging and mailing the letter.
Notes About Indian War To World War I Era Records
Spanish-American War records are
much like those of the Civil War and need not be addressed here. Other records
usually searched by SRS at the downtown facility are most often correspondence
files of the Army Chief of Ordnance, Navy Bureau of Ordnance, or the USMC
Quartermaster or USMC Headquarters. These records are usually letter size,
folded in thirds, and packed in boxes that hold several hundred letters. To
search them efficiently you need to understand the filing system used by the
organization at the time (they all appear to have changed systems over time,
some changed several times). But these letters have often been shuffled by
previously researchers and it may be necessary to go through them one at a
time. It takes me about an hour to go through a box of these letters one at a
time, much longer if I find interesting material along the way.
For Army correspondence up to 1870
letters received were filed by year, then by the first initial of the writer’s
last name, and then numerically in order received. Unfortunately this means a
letter from the Colt factory might be filed under C (Sam Colt or the Colt
Company), R (Root), F (Fales) or H (Hartley). Letters
received between 1870 and 1894 were simply numbered in the order received each
year. From 1894 to 1915 letters were filed by “subject number” and these
records are exceptionally difficult to search if the file subject number can’t
be identified. Up to the introduction of the typewriter letters sent were
copied into volumes but separate volume series wee used based on to whom the
letters were sent (the Secretary of War, Ordnance officers, arsenals and
armories or to miscellaneous parties). So you need to understand how the
Ordnance Department did business at the time. All this is too complicated to
cover here in more detail.
Other records of note that are
downtown are records of posts/forts and individual units, these being very
limited, unfortunately. Each of these sets of records presents its own
challenges, especially for those periods in which the filing systems that were used
changed.
Modern
Records and the
College Park
Facility
As previously mentioned, most post
World War I records are at the
College
Park
,
MD
, facility.
The best way to get there is to drive but you can also first go to the downtown
facility and catch a bus to “Archives II.” There is plentiful free parking at
this facility and it is a beautiful, modern building. The hours and general
procedures are the same but here you have more to do in identifying the records
to be pulled – you have to identify the physical location of the records
yourself. The finding aids for identifying the records you want pulled and
their locations are voluminous and confusing. The record organizations are, in
some cases, still changing – a very frustrating problem for people who first
looked at these records several years ago. In many cases records that were
previously in one record group have now been assigned to new ones. Within
record groups many entries have been broken down further or re-numbered. Many
records that we previously noted by box number have now been re-boxed and our
citations are no longer valid. Unfortunately few of the archivists who are
there to help are familiar with these changes so we jointly have to figure out
where to look for documents in these situations.
The
College Park
records of SRS interest are
mostly in the same categories as last described above – the most useful being
military correspondence files, but unit/organization files are also productive.
For example, the
OSS
records contain many records showing issues of weapons to individuals. As
another example, in the records of the Southwest Pacific Area I recently found
over four hundred Model 1903 rifles that had been assigned to individual ships
of the U.S. Army’s World War II fleet. I’m currently going through about 40
boxes of Treasury Department “settled claims” from the Civil War (old records
but stored in
College Park
)
in an attempt to find the thousands of small arms bought from dealers in the
early years of the Civil War. Individual purchases were made of single weapons
up to hundreds at a time from a given dealer. I’ve found no serial numbers yet
in these settled claims but it takes up to three hours to review a single box
and I’ve only gone through eight boxes so far.
Many of the records stored at
College Park
were once
classified and still bear the markings of the classification. The staff at this facility pay close attention to this matter
and any copies of documents marked as classified must have the declassification
notice applied or you will not be able to take them out of the facility.
An added benefit of the
College Park
facility is
that it contains the collection of still and motion pictures. This latter
Archives branch is not very busy and the staff can pull records for you
quickly. Some of these photos are absolutely fascinating. Overall the College
Park facility is more busy, and crowded, than downtown since it contains such
records as the Nixon tapes and JFK assassination records (both still popular),
and records that are heavily used by government paid researchers, World War
II/Korea/Vietnam researchers and researchers from overseas.
Microfilm
Records at the Archives
The Archives tries to provide
records that are frequently accessed through microfilm. This prevents damage to
the often fragile originals and speeds researcher access since the microfilm is
stored in containers directly available to the researcher. Many records of
interest to military arms researchers are available only on microfilm. These include
most if not all of the Secretary of War records, most of the Adjutant General
records, ordnance returns, regimental and post returns, and more and more
individual soldier service records are being filmed. But many of these
documents are very hard to read on microfilm and, with wear of the film, are
becoming even more so. Large format documents like the returns are especially
problematical. A digital image of reasonable resolution would be much better.
Unfortunately, in this day of excellent digital scanning and imagery, the
Archives is still slavishly devoted to microfilm, which cannot be viewed except
by one person at a time, wears through the mechanical process of viewing and,
of course, cannot be posted on-line or searched through computer technology.
Making paper copies from the microfilm is so inconvenient and the quality of
the copy is so poor that I usually don’t attempt it.
Conclusion
Obviously this is only a superficial
treatment of the research process and the records themselves. A quick review of
SRS data showed we have found serial numbers in at least 45 separate record
groups at the National Archives (we have searched several other repositories as
well) and, as you can see from the above, to research any given record group
it’s best to first learn some things about the organization that created the
records. To give you more perspective regarding the volume of SRS data, in the
2007 version of the database there are now 316,297 records. (If you have ever
done data entry you can appreciate the mind-numbing effort it has been to
record all this information.) Of these database records a relatively small
number are multiple occurrences of the same serial numbers due to the numbers
appearing in multiple documents. The source documents are not uniquely
identified in our records so a count of them is not practical, but it should be
clear to anyone that the number is great. We’ve gone through a staggering
volume of documents to find the very low percent of them that contain serial
numbers. (I took over SRS in 2003, but I had followed founder Frank Mallory’s
work since I began my own research at the National Archives in 1977 and was
pleased to contribute those numbers that I found.) It should be equally obvious
that it was impossible to copy these documents or to even record much
information about them. In many cases I know little more about the details of
source documents than is recorded in the usage summary of the database.
Consequently a trip to the Archives and a sometimes significant effort is required
to provide a provenance letter.
If you’re coming from out of town,
plan to spend two or more days at the facility you are visiting, have something
to do while you are waiting for documents, and don’t be surprised if your
research takes longer than you anticipated. In the best case scenarios, such as
the above Civil War Remington revolver, it takes a minimum of three hours to
provide an SRS provenance letter that requires research at the National
Archives. The average appears to be four to six hours. This does not include
travel time, the time it took to find the serial number the first time, or the
time required to develop and maintain the database.
Given the cutback in Archives operational hours, the limited numbers of
document pulls in a day and the frequency in which either I or the Archives
staff makes a mistake (or the records can’t be found/are unavailable), I’m only
able to work one to three requests in any given day at the Archives. Some
requests require multiple trips for one reason or another.
All that having been said, this
research, I believe, is historically important and satisfying and I think you
will find that to be the case as well. During my time as Chief Researcher on the SRS research task
I’ve documented a Model 1903 rifle salvaged from the Battleship “California,”
sunk at Pearl Harbor; three Indian scout Trapdoor carbines; five guns of the
Rough Riders; one Colt single Action used in the Little Bighorn Battle, and a
great many other interesting weapons. Opening every box or volume of records is
an adventure. Yes, the information we find is sometimes mundane but much is not
and there are rare finds that by themselves make the effort worthwhile. In
addition to those already mentioned, I recently found Sam Colt’s personal
letter to BG Ripley (Chief of Ordnance) telling him of his having sent the
General a presentation set of a Model 1860 Army, a Model 1861 Navy and a Police
Model revolver. Last year I found the serial number of Captain David Lyle’s
personal Trapdoor rifle (Lyle invented the line throwing Lyle Gun and inspected
both Colt SAA and S&W Schofield revolvers) and the serial numbers of the
Colt SAA and Schofield revolvers used in a trigger pull test at the Springfield
Armory. All these numbers have been added to the SRS database. The list goes on and on. So the work is
vicariously rewarding, even if it is often just documenting the issue of a
Remington revolver to a 19 years old farm boy named Hann from Fulton County Pennsylvania.
.