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Palmetto State Armory
Glock 19 Gen5 MOS
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Winchester 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.
Winchester is the case that proves the whole idea. The company kept ledgers; the company that owns the name does not. The surviving factory records went to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West — the Olin Corporation donated the Winchester collection and its records to Cody around 1978 — and for most of the following decades they sat as paper. They have been digitised only comparatively recently, and are reachable through the McCracken Research Library. Anyone expecting Winchester Repeating Arms to answer a serial question is asking the wrong institution, and that is not obvious from any page the brand publishes today.
Who holds the records today
Covers 1866 to the 1980s, with gaps in the later ranges
Serial table published by the maker?
No.
Winchester does not publish a serial table anyone can trust. The PDF that circulated on its own site has been described by collectors as erroneous, and the widely copied charts are known to be loose — off by years on some models. Cody works from the original ledgers instead, which is why a letter and an online chart disagree.
Archive letter
Cost: from $95 (non-member rate; members pay less)
Waiting time: commonly weeks rather than months from payment
Observed 2026-10-14 — confirm with the archive before ordering.
Can a serial number date a Winchester?
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
The Winchester Book — George Madis. The standard printed reference; its tables are themselves a secondary source, which is the point — the ledgers are primary.
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