Our information shows Hall's birth as November 5, 1841 and death as May 14, 1909 (the latter supported in multiple numismatic places, the former coming from several Harvard Medical school references). He was born in Boston, was educated in the area (Harvard), worked at the City Hospital of Boston and died at Chelmsford Center, MA. Dr. Thomas Hall, an accomplished Harvard (1866) educated physician, was a significant influence and collector of federal and colonial state coinages. Most known for his US large cents and Connecticut Coppers, he built important collections where collectors value his provenance, to this day.

However, his contributions to research and classification of Connecticut coppers cannot be overstated. Dr. Hall leveraged the earlier Crosby attribution system, which grouped Connecticut coppers in coarse categories by common date, legend and ornamentation. Hall devised a system of identifying each individual obverse and reverse die within Crosby's coarse groupings, and then tabulated pairings and combinations by rarity. He created an extensive hand written manuscript on his classifications, with his personal copy in the Connecticut State Library and another hand copy, believed made for contemporary William Wallace Hays, now in the Hamelberg collection (ex. John J. Ford).

These works formed the basis of Henry C. Miller's modest revisions and 1920 ANS publication on Connecticut Coppers. But, not all of Hall's work remained unpublished. In 1892, he took the 1787 dated subset of his manuscript and published it privately to solicit additions and corrections from his peers. There are up to 17 copies known today, many with some form of hand annotations by Hall to update page references or to add tidbits of information. If one assumes a low publication run and a high survival rate, it is a reasonable conclusion that no more than 20 to 25 copies of this 1892 work were printed.

One particular copy of Hall's 1892 publication has recently been located and digitized by the Newman Numismatic Portal. Hall's personal copy of this 1892 work, with extensive additions and corrections, is a fantastic addition to the two known hand written manuscripts. Based on the content of this new finding, these notes are more recent than those found in the Connecticut State Library copy of his personal manuscript, with only a subset of his new publication notes being added to that older personal manuscript. It is always a pleasure to review the personal work of early researchers and collectors of Federal and Colonial coinages, but for those who specialize in Connecticut Coppers, the work of Dr. Thomas Hall is extremely important and it is delightful to see the efforts of the Newman Numismatic Portal bringing these important findings to light.