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.

Would it not be better to unify in a main project where a couple hundred eyes are reporting to a database the continuing existance of Krag rifles"

Some fourms have a special closed sub-forum that open only to members with a second log on.  Serial numbers could be placed in that out of sight location from the general world in there is a privacy concern.

more to follow.

We could start a serial number thread here. Lets kick it around a bit and work out some details and guide lines.

Any way.  It was my thought to keep it simple.  The serial number; Model - 1894, 1895, 1896, Model 1896, Model 1898, Model 1899; the date last seen in existance; and maybe four choices of its condition such as RO-receiver only, BR -barreled receiver, Cutdown, or Military.  Perhaps Military Carbine or Military Rifle when last seen.

It would be great if some of the founders of KCA who have large collections would add their guns to the list.   But if they want to keep who owns what quiet maybe Ned could be the filter.  I don't have a problem adding my numbers to the list as a few of them have already been posted here.

Kinda like this but a lot less noisy.

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Just one guy's opinion.  I am already running my personal Win-Lee census like this.

Maybe we could keep the first couple of columns in the same fashion as Mallory.

sn       model    date seen     other   other    other
                      YYYY MM DD

1200  1894R     2015 03 26
4000  1895R     2016 10 00  (where you do not recall the exact date but know the month)
34000  1896R    2016 06 19
55000  M1896C 2017 01 01

and so on.

Some thing like that.

So it would look like Mallory.  Like this?

sn       model    date seen     notes

Where Mallory used the term Usage in the place of the above suggested Notes.

I'm hip to whatever we come up with but we have to be all in on this.  One or two guys can not search all of the commonly known places on the net that may have Krags.  It would be doomed to semi-failure.  Trust me on that.

I suppose if we really want to get nerdish we could include all of the known destroyed krags from Mallory.   

I search through hundreds of Krags through auction sites and would be willing to keep track of some of the data from ones I see but I'm not going to write a book on each one! That's why I'm advocating for less detailed info with a section for "notes" or whatever you want to call it for additional information people may want to add about their personally owned Krags.

The more complicated you make it, the less people like me will want to compile and add info for Krags that we see online or in our LGS. If I was retired and had nothing else to do (like shoot my Krags!), I'd be more willing to create huge amounts of data.

Thanks Ned and Tom for working on this. Getting it started is the hardest job!