Ever wonder who first purchased your gun or rifle?
Charles Lindbergh, or James Roosevelt or some other luminary may have been the original buyer.
Perhaps the provenance would increase the value of your favorite fowling piece or rifle.
Well, now you have a chance to find out for free if the gun was sold by VonLengerke & Detmold or Abercrombie & Fitch, two of the largest and most prestigious gun houses of the 20th century.
Griffin & Howe, the custom gunmaker, was a division of Abercrombie from 1929 until Abercrombie bankrupted in 1976.
It is now a private company, but in the vaults are scores of musty old ledgers dating from 1901 for VL&D and from 1929 for A&F, each containing the records of sale for thousands of firearms that passed over the counter at these two venerable firms.
Bob Beach, the chief cook and bottle washer in charge of records research with G&H has meticulously overseen the laborious task of transcribing records to digital format that you can search and if you get a match for free or get a certificate for a nominal charge.
The records G&H have are from VL&D from 1901 until A&F took them over in 1928 and for A&F from 1929 until 1976. To date he has added over 25,000 guns to the list from 1901 until 1939 with lots more to come- you have to keep going back to the G&H site to see new entries.
So, if you own one of the following guns, check out the link at the bottom of this article:
Gun Makes with serial numbers on file at G&H:
A&F, Baker, Bayard, Boss, Britte, Browning, BSA, Cashmore, Churchill, Crescent, Defourney, Dumoulin, Folsom, Fox, Francotte, Fred Adolph, GE Lewis, Gibbs, Greener, Greifelt Griffin & Howe, Harpoon Guns, Henry Atkin, Hoffman Arms, Holland & Holland, Hollenbeck, Hollis, Bentley & Playfair, Ithaca, Iver Johnson, Jaeger, Jeffery, Kimball 20th Century, Krieghoff, Lancaster, Lang, LC Smith, Lefever, Leonard, Liege, Luck, Mahillon, Mannlicher-Schoenauer, Marlin, Martini, Mauser, Meffert, Merkel, Nimrod, Ogden Smith & Hussey, Owen Parker, Purdey, Remington, Remo Gehr, Rheinmetall, Rigby, Sauer, Savage, Schmidt & Haberman, Sedgley, Seymour Griffin, Simson, Springer, Springfield, Stephen Grant, Stoeger, Syracuse, Thieme & Schlegelmilch, Thompson, Tolley, Venus Waffen Werk, W&C Scott, Walther, Webley & Scott, Westley Richards, Winchester, Woodward.
Contact:
Robert C. Beach, Records Research
Griffin & Howe, Inc.
33 Claremont Road
Bernardsville, NJ 07924
908-766-2287
Email: research@griffinhowe.com
Website: www.griffinhowe.com