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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 45, November 4, 2001, Article 8 NUMISMATIC RESEARCH AND ACCESSING ORIGINAL MATERIAL. Dick Johnson writes: "This is in answer to Carl Honore's lament in the October 28th E-Sylum that all the archives of numismatic interest are in the East and he is in the Pacific Northwest: (1) BE DEDICATED. Recognize that the archives are not going to come to you. You must go to them. Research is expensive, in both time and money. Part of that cost is travel. If you cannot take a sabbatical from your job for the time off to research, consider vacation time. Otherwise you are going to have to wait until you retire for the time required to do your numismatic research activities. A professional man I know is looking forward to his retirement, a few months away, to research Lifesaving Medals. He had planned this in advance and did as much homework ahead of time as possible. He will now have the resources to do this chore unencumbered by calendar or checkbook problems. True the archives are not distributed with geographical equality: Some things in life are not fair. You must go to them. I remember talking with a researcher from England. He came to America to research at the library of the American Numismatic Society. I asked why. "You have the greatest collection of numismatic books in one room right here," he said. Perhaps he had been to other libraries where the works were scattered. We are fortunate to have these national numismatic treasures nearby. Others have traveled great distances to access these. (2) HONE YOUR RESEARCH TRAITS. I have mentioned this before in E-Sylum: join a local genealogy club. You will learn resources and techniques that you never knew before. Also there is probably more resources in your area than you may be aware. I have been writing and researching in numismatics since college days. Gad, that's almost fifty years. I thought I knew how to research. But the little ol' grandmothers in my genealogy club sometimes run circles around me. They have taught me a lot, and are very willing to impart the knowledge and techniques they often learned the hard way. They also have contacts that are unbelievable. Last month we took a field trip to Boston. At the Massachusetts State Archives (next door to the Kennedy Archives) we had a speaker who was a friend of one of our members and she pulled out documents and passed them around that, she said, she would do for no other group. We also visited the New England Historic and Genealogical Society. Five floors of pure research pleasure, books and manuscripts. (3) ASK FOR HELP. It is amazing what you can get from others. Often a polite inquiry will provide more data than you can imagine. We are presently living in a society of tremendous information available; others often have this and are willing to give you what you want, if you only ask. Case in point: I was working on early U.S. Mint technology. Became friends with Craig Sholley, who had done a great deal of this work before me. He had found the Peale Report of 1835 at the Philadelphia National Archives and photocopied the entire Report. Franklin Peale was the mechanical genius, you may recall, who was hired by the U.S. Mint and sent by Director Samuel Moore to tour the mints of Europe and report his findings. Here they are on 272 legal size pages, in Peale's own hand. (This led to the introduction of the steam press for coining and the engraving pantograph for making dies at the Philadelphia Mint.) Craig was kind enough to photocopy his set and send these to me. In turn, I transcribed much of the Report (with the aid of a consenting wife who is better at deciphering difficult handwriting than I). Even so, it required another trip to the Philadelphia National Archives for both of us to solve some remaining problems by pouring over the original. (4) LAST POINT, DREAM! Create in your mind what you would like to do if you had all the resources you needed. My dream is a mobile home to travel and park in the lots of archives and museums of America. Meaningful research does not happen in one or two days. It often requires weeks. You have to learn what is available, how it is arranged, how to use it, the rules and requirements of the institution (like using those damn white gloves!), then immerse yourself. It is best if you can do this research in solid chunks of time rather than numerous one-day visits. For research on early American die sinkers, I need to search city directories from a large number of cities. Fortunately, the largest collection of these is at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, about a two-hour drive for me. But I would rather stay in a motor home parked nearby and visit this archive day-after-day for as long as it takes to search these directories. (I dream this, in preference to staying in hotels or motels, for the time needed to stretch my research travel budget.) Incidentally, despite the largest collection of city directories in America at AAS, they are available to researchers only on microfilm. Get used to using these machines and pouring over the gray-glow screens for hours. If you can prove a page is missing or damaged in the film they may retrieve the original (if they have it) to let you examine it. So crank the ol' microfilm machines (or, if you ar lucky, use the new motorized ones)). Now, Carl, what can you do before you retire to advance numismatics by your as yet unfound discoveries? Contact local museums and offer your numismatic expertise to catalog their holdings. You will have to prove your qualifications to the curator. But you will find this fulfilling and you might make one of those discoveries in your own backyard. Also search out microfilm available for interlibrary loan; I found a journal of die sinkers in the Scovill archives at the Baker Library at Harvard. In this case I had to pay to have the microfilm made (since no researcher before me had examined it), but once this was done I could use this at my local library who saw that it was returned to Baker Library after I was done with it (that was their requirement). Last words, Carl: Dream! then Go! P.S. Researching in all these institutions has started me gathering a new collectable: the photocopy machine debit cards. Unlike credit cards these plastic chits are rather plain. However, I predict these are the "provisionals" and future ones will have more elaborate and colorful designs, a different one for each institution. Even in their present state, however, they are more meaningful to researchers than those innocuous plastic phone cards that are used by the public (and collected by phonocardiographies)."

Wayne Homren, Editor

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