Newman Numismatic Portal

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 I checked back through Archives.org, a great site in searching public records, libraries and universities for amazing historical documents.



"The goal of the Newman Numismatic Portal is to create the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia of American and Colonial coinage, currency, realia, and related correspondence and published literature. Materials from the Eric P. Newman Numismatic Education Society’s coin collections and supporting reference libraries will be digitized along with Washington University Libraries’ collections and made freely available to an online community of scholars and enthusiasts.



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 importantant 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.



From the site:

Content Update - the scanning operation at the Newman Numismatic Portal (NNP) is in full gear, and we have processed over a thousand items to date. Readers can follow our progress at archive.org/details/newmannumismatic. Our most recent addition is a group of bid books from the auction firms of Samuel and Henry Chapman, Philadelphia coin dealers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This collection was formed over many years by Dan Hamelberg and we thank him for his generosity in loaning the material for scanning. We have scanned over a hundred Mint Reports, and we anticipate further growth in our government documents collection thanks to the assistance of Katrina Stierholz (Federal Reserve Bank Librarian) and Tove Klovning (Assistant Law Librarian at Washington University). Government documents reveal details of the Mint operation not found elsewhere (such as employee names and salaries) and heretofore have not been easily accessible to numismatic researchers.



I wanted to pass this along to all as it is really a special endeavor and one that this group hopefully will support going forward.



Portal Link