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Smith & Wesson factory records
Who holds this maker's production records today, whether a serial table exists at all, and what it costs to have the archive read them.
Smith & Wesson is the counter-example to every "the records are gone" story in this field. The archives survive, they are extensive, and a dedicated foundation exists to read them. The foundation is candid about why the research costs what it does: the material is not one tidy ledger but many different record types kept in different ways, sometimes contradicting each other, and reading it well took the historians years to learn. Two products exist — a Letter of Authenticity, and a deeper Historical Deep Dive — which is a useful distinction: the first authenticates the gun, the second researches its past.
Who holds the records today
Covers Corporate archives spanning nearly 175 years
Serial table published by the maker?
No.
S&W does not publish a browsable serial table; the foundation reads the archives for a serial. Collector references carry the widely used date ranges for pre-1957 guns.
Archive letter
Cost: $100; $90 for S&WCA or S&WHF members; $75 for members of both. Add $8 postage outside the US and Canada
Waiting time: not published by the foundation
Observed 2026-10-14 — confirm with the archive before ordering.
Can a serial number date a Smith & Wesson?
From the serial number alone, generally no — and that is the honest answer rather than a gap in this site. There is no published table to compare the number against, so any year you find online for this maker comes from a secondary reconstruction, and those are exactly as reliable as their author.
Dating then rests on what is on the gun: 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.
Reference work
Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson — Supica & Nahas. The standard reference, and the source of most of the serial ranges quoted online.
Date a firearm by its serial number
The lookup covers only makers that publish their own browsable chart — and it says which, and cites the threshold behind every result.
Open the serial number lookup