Possible replacement national
TheGrandRapidian
Posts: 168 ✭✭
Anyone think these serials look a little odd? Maybe its not a replacement but just curious.
Collecting Grand Rapids, Michigan Nationals all denominations, series, and types as well as obsoletes.
Please PM me with any available for sale.
Please PM me with any available for sale.
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nobody gets it: "Cash Is King ! "
note?
I still don't know how to tell a replacement national by its serial number. Is ColonelCassiusk's note a sample of a replacement
note?
Look at the tops and / or bottoms of the number digits for poor inking. These replacements
were numbered individually on hand machines, not on the regular numbering presses.
nobody gets it: "Cash Is King ! "
Relatively recently there was an article on the subject in Paper Money whole number 278 which is also available on the SPMC website. Most often those identified are serials that are poorly inked, skewed, etc. But there are some replacements that were fairly well done and some of the key diagnostics to id them are listed on this thread (taken from the PM article): linky
To be honest, I'm not sure I can document this completely, but here's what I understand:
Nationals are different animals than other federally issued notes. First off, even with stars all of a bank's specific information would need to be printed on the notes before the seals and serials. More importantly, serials are actually sheet serials not banknote serials, a convention which started in the obsolete period and continued thru type 1s. Under this approach, a specific note was identified by both the sheet serial and sheet position letter, the prefix letter on type 1s. The suffix letter, which is A on almost all type 1s, was incremented to B after the first million sheets of a denomination for a bank were printed. The numbering was changed to banknote serials for type 2 notes, but the same approach to replacements (ie replacing the spoiled sheet with another with the same serials) was continued until nationals were ended a couple of years later.
I think the driver was how nationals were accounted for by the Comptroller of the Currency and the additional effort required if stars had been introduced. The bond and currency ledgers indicate when shipments were received from the BEP and when currency was sent to the bank by sheet number. For instance, a shipment might be recorded as 1000 sheets of $5s, A001000A to F001999A, on a given date, and in a separate transaction 100 sheets, numbered A001000A to F001099A, were shipped to the bank a day or two later. The remaining 900 sheets would be retained by the Comptroller to be issued to the bank as the need arose. Inserting stars with a completely different run of serials (eg a sheet A000070* to F000070*replacing spoiled sheet A-E001064A) could have been seen as an accounting issue in keeping the books in balance.
Perhaps most importantly, for most banks, print runs were relatively to quite small; for instance, the first print run of $20s for 12389 (Telegraphers of STL) was just 262 sheets and could be quite tiny for small and many "country" banks. The use of stars would have required the BEP to keep a small stock of stars on hand for 1000s of banks for replacements (a significant security/storage issue) or, more likely, printing the stars as the need arose which is effectively the same work as just replacing the spoiled sheet with a replacement sheet having the same serials. So, stars never seem to have provided any save of effort/work for nationals.
As a sidebar, altho printed on NBN stock, it is interesting that small frbn used stars in line with other federal reserve issues since federal serial numbering was used for them.
Many thanks for all the background.