With some time off over the holidays I continued my search for the provenance of my 1842 $5 ex. Milas. I checked back through Archive.org, a great site in searching public records, libraries and universities for amazing historical documents.

I frequent this site and recently a set of very important auction catalogs have been uploaded. The catalogs in normal form are important but what makes these especially important is that they are annotated with the buyers of the lots. Cleneay, Parmalee two name two. Many of these come from the Harry Bass Library via Dan Hamelberg. These documents allow for provenances to be researched with potentially one of a kind reference documents available to all.

The Newman Portal uses Internet Archive as a scanning repository. All scans appear at Internet Archive. Material scanned by the Newman Portal appears on Internet Archive almost immediately, so the latest activity can always be seen there. In parallel, the Newman Portal has its own website that presents a cleaner interface to scanned materials. That link is Newman Numismatic Portal. This site will lag behind the activity on Internet Archive. In particular, we currently have a large number of auction catalogs on Internet Archive that are not yet linked into the Portal.

We are systematically working through the early U.S. auction catalogs in the rare book room at the American Numismatic Society. We have 90 of these already posted on Internet Archive, with a good number in the Chapman and Cogan series. We've also had material loaned from private libraries - Dan Hamelberg, Bill Burd, and others. Our intention is to maintain a good mix in the scanning pipeline - auction catalogs, periodicals, books, and archival material from the Newman library. All that said, we are certainly open to requests and will fit these in as our bandwidth allows.

This will be a humdinger of a resource for collectors interested in pedigrees and numismatic history in general.

I have begun tracing back the Clapp/Eliasberg half eagles through the material to Cleneay, Earle, Parmalee, etc.