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You've inherited a firearm

Seven steps, in the order that protects the gun's value and your safety. Most of them cost nothing, and the first one is the one people skip — which is why it is first.

Each step carries its sources. Where the honest answer is "this is where doing it yourself stops being right", the step says so rather than inventing something to do next.

0

Before you touch it

Do not clean it. Not the metal, not the wood, not "just the surface". This is the first instruction because it is the one that costs money, and because the damage happens in the first week.

Do this
  • Leave it exactly as you found it. Dust, grease, light surface rust and even an old wipe of oil are evidence.
  • If it must be handled, hold it by the wood and the receiver, and put it down on something soft.
  • Photograph it as-found, before anything changes. Those photographs are the record of its original condition and may be the only ones that exist.
Do not do this
  • Do not clean it before an appraisal, a sale, or a trip to the gunsmith. An appraiser wants to see original condition, not your idea of it. A buyer reads a freshly cleaned old gun with suspicion — and asks what was being covered up. A gunsmith may specifically want the evidence you just scrubbed away. One specialist source calls this the single most common way people reduce the value of an inherited gun in the first week of owning it.
  • Do not "restore" it. Conservation means holding the line against further deterioration; restoration means changing it, and on a collectible the two are not the same word.
  • Do not use a wire brush, an abrasive pad or steel wool on blued steel. They remove the blue — that is what they are for — and it does not come back. Bronze or brass wool is softer than steel; household abrasive pads are far worse.
  • Do not drag a jointed cleaning rod through the muzzle. Barrel steel is softer than people assume and the crown is where it shows; an off-centre rod wears one side of it stroke by stroke. If the action opens, clean from the breech with a one-piece rod.
  • Do not flood the wood with oil. That is where stocks crack and split, because the oil softens the wood behind the action. Oil the metal sparingly and wipe the excess; keep solvents off the wood entirely, since many strip finish on contact.

Sources for this step: Sears Guns — "The Damage People Do While Cleaning Old Guns" · Kiko Firearms — "Conservation vs Restoration: why cleaning up an old gun can destroy its value" · Auction Armory — cleaning and preserving a collectible firearm without damaging its value

1

Make it safe, then treat it as loaded

Safety comes before identification, and old guns are found loaded far more often than people expect — including guns that have sat untouched for decades.

Do this
  • Assume it is loaded. This is the assumption every source starts from.
  • Keep it pointed in a safe direction with your finger off the trigger, and open the action to check the chamber and the magazine by sight and by feel.
  • If you do not know how to open the action, do not experiment with it. Leave it alone, pointed somewhere safe, and get someone who knows — a gunsmith, a gun shop, or an experienced shooter.
  • Once it is confirmed empty, store it unloaded and secured, away from children, with any ammunition kept separately.
  • Before you ever fire it, have a gunsmith check it. Decades of storage do things to springs, bores and wood that an inspection finds and a guess does not.
Do not do this
  • Do not assume a gun found in a box is empty because it "looks" empty, or because it was always unloaded by the person who owned it.
  • Do not attempt to free a seized action to find out what the gun is. The identification can wait; the safety question cannot.

Sources for this step: Sears Guns — "You’ve Inherited a Gun: What to Do First"

3

Find the markings

Almost every old gun tells you what it is, if you know where to look — and the usual place is not the only place. Work through this list with the gun confirmed unloaded, in good light.

Do this
  • Start with the obvious: the barrel, the receiver, and the frame.
  • Then go through the hidden locations — they are listed in full on the unmarked-gun page, and they include the underside of the barrel, the receiver flats, under the stock and inside the barrelled action.
  • Use raking light: shine a light across the metal from the side rather than straight at it. Worn stamping shows as a shadow when lit from the side even when it is invisible head-on.
  • Write down what you find, including the things you cannot read. A partial stamp is still evidence.
  • Note which marks are proof marks rather than maker’s marks — they answer a different question, and the legend on this site decodes the common ones.
Do not do this
  • Do not conclude the gun is unmarked until you have been through the whole list. Markings hide in more places than people check.
  • Do not polish a weak stamping to try to read it. That is how a weak stamping becomes no stamping.

Sources for this step: Sears Guns — "No Markings At All: Identifying an Unmarked Gun" · National Rifle Association — "Proof Marks" reference catalogue · GunVault — documenting provenance, proof and import marks

4

Decide whether it is original, a replica, or a knock-off

This question changes everything that follows — value, safety, and what to do with it — and it is the question where an untrained eye most often gets it wrong in both directions.

Do this
  • Look for modern manufacturing marks where an original would have none. On black powder arms in particular, imported replicas carry Italian, Belgian, German or Spanish proof-house symbols, a maker’s device, and an encoded date of proof, which on these arms is usually also the date of manufacture.
  • Check the fasteners. Modern screws, modern casting marks and modern machining inside a gun that is otherwise dressed to look old are the strongest single clue.
  • Check for import and distributor stamps. If the maker’s mark is absent but an importer’s is present, that is itself informative.
  • Consider that an unmarked gun may never have been marked. Before 1968, US law did not require manufacturers to mark firearms at all, so a gun bearing only an importer’s mark is not necessarily a fake — it may simply be of that era.
  • Take it seriously as a possibility either way. Genuine antique muzzleloaders were also made by thousands of small individual makers and are often unsigned, with no certain way to name the maker.
Do not do this
  • Do not conclude "replica" from a single detail, or "original" from age of appearance. Replicas are artificially aged deliberately, and the tell is almost never the patina.
  • Do not assume an unmarked gun is a fake. An unmarked gun is a harder research problem, not a verdict.
  • Do not fire it on the assumption it is a replica. Some replicas are not made for live ammunition, and some originals are not safe with it.

Sources for this step: Cap & Ball Revolvers — identifying black powder replica revolver manufacturers · National Rifle Association museum — on firearms that are hard to identify or value · National Rifle Association — "Proof Marks" reference catalogue · ATF / Federal Register — identification markings placed on firearms, and the Gun Control Act serial-number requirement

5

Date it, where a date is determinable

A serial number dates a gun only if the maker published a chart you can check. That is a real limit, not a gap in this site, and where it holds the lookup says which chart it came from.

Do this
  • Run the serial number through the lookup — but only after reading the rest of this step, because a made-up year is worse than no year.
  • Check whether the maker published a browsable chart at all. The records pages say who holds a maker’s factory records today and whether a published table exists, which is the question that comes before the serial number matters.
  • Where no table exists, date the gun from what is on it instead: the maker’s marking and address, the model and its catalogued period, proof marks and their era, patent dates, and the manufacturer’s own model history.
  • Record the year as an estimate with its source, never as a fact.
Do not do this
  • Do not accept a year from a table that was reconstructed by someone else and not cited. Secondary serial tables are exactly as reliable as their author, and many in circulation have no stated source at all.
  • Do not assume a serial number means the date is knowable. For many makers it simply is not — the records are destroyed, lost, or were never kept in a form anyone can read.

Sources for this step: National Rifle Association museum — on firearms that are hard to identify or value

6

Where self-service stops

This is the honest ending, and it is the same answer the community gives: for a gun with no readable markings, hands-on inspection by someone experienced is the next step, and no website replaces it.

Do this
  • Take it to a gunsmith or a specialist. The community’s own advice is "take it to a reputable gunsmith for a deep cleaning and identification" — and a museum reference makes the stronger point that for some classes of gun, identification is partly an art that depends on hands-on examination.
  • For a military arm, a specialist collector forum is materially better than a general one. For an antique, a specialist society often knows the specific maker’s family of designs.
  • Record what you were told, by whom, and when — including the "probably".
Do not do this
  • Do not treat a forum identification as settled. In the corpus the same unmarked revolver drew two confident, mutually exclusive answers in the same thread, which is the normal behaviour of photo identification rather than a failure of any one respondent.
  • Do not expect this site to identify a gun from a photograph. It will not, because that would be a promise the evidence does not support.

Sources for this step: Sears Guns — "No Markings At All: Identifying an Unmarked Gun" · National Rifle Association museum — on firearms that are hard to identify or value

Now put it on one page

The record card collects what the procedure established — and states plainly what is not determinable, and why. That is the version an insurer or an estate can actually use.

Build the record card Nothing on it? The unmarked case Run the serial number

Procedure compiled and sources last checked 2026-10-14. Nothing here is legal advice or an appraisal, and this site does not identify firearms from photographs.