I was in the process of running a census based on Mallory appendix.  However I left the book at home when I came to Africa.

I was copying the pages to pdf and converting them to OCR and then porting them to he excel.  The hard part was hitting the auctions and places like gunbroker to record serial numbers.  But I am just one man.  Hold on a sec.  Yep, a man.

It was my idea to build on Mr. Mallory's (Praise to his name) work by adding a new column to record the date of any observed serial number in current existance.