The World of Confederate Government Treasury Notes
The Digital Future
Much information has been gathered and documented by researchers regarding these notes, but this information is generally paper-based, fragmented, and not easy for collectors to access or to understand. This website aims to provide a unique online hub for collectors and researchers of Confederate Government Treasury Notes. Digitization of this information is essential for its preservation and ongoing usage, but more important perhaps is the opportunity to use technology to attract future generations of numismatists and collectors.
At the heart of the website is a relational database which fully models the world of Confederate Government Treasury Notes. A large amount of information and research on Confederate currency has been produced over the last century, and is available in reference books, numismatic publications, and public archives. The Editor has created a data model that distils this information down to its core components, in a coherent and logical way. The underlying information has then been codified and uploaded, piece-by-piece, into the database. This process has taken more than a year and the Editor acknowledges the valuable advice of Mike McNeil, Charles Derby, Pierre Fricke and Enrico Aidala. The resulting database provides a unique repository for collectors and researchers of Confederate Government Treasury Notes.
The sections below provide further information on the database, and on the Editor's vision for creating an online application environment that could provide a unique homebase and community for collectors and researchers.
Future Vision
As a technologist by trade, and a numismatist in his spare time, the Editor believes it would be both possible and desirable to have “media-rich” environments for collectors of notes, bonds, postage stamps, and the like. Confederate Treasury notes would make a great candidate: namely, an online, easy to use, content rich, information hub - a kind of Wikipedia for Confederate Treasury notes. This concept should prove helpful for today’s collectors but is arguably essential to attracting any future collectors. With this objective in mind, I have begun to construct an online, relational database of Confederate Treasury note data which will serve as a central hub. To date, using detailed information drawn from Raphael Thian’s “Register of the Confederate Debt” and other sources, I have loaded details of more than eighty million Treasury notes, as well as information about Issues, Signers for the Register and Treasurer, and the various engraving and printing companies. It’s a start.
The first release of the environment in Q1/2025 will contain an SQL relational database containing the Treasury Note components of Raphael Thian's Register of the Confederate Debt. This database contains the complete details of the 200,000+ individual batches of Treasury Notes that Thian recorded in his Register, pages 6 thru 178. This includes Issue dates, denominations, series, plens, serial number runs, and the signers. Furthermore, Thian's base data has been cleansed of errors where possible and has been enriched with modern constructs such as the Criswell Type classification, details of Printers, and a wealth of other interesting information and recommended reference materials.
The relational database is fully searchable using SQL-type statements, and the Editor will be happy to assist in any research-related projects. Information that would have taken weeks or months to produce manually will now be available in minutes. In addition, a wide range of standard reports and queries will be provided for immediate use by collectors who wish to learn more about the Confederate notes that they have in their collection or are seeking. It will be possible for a collector to use basic information to be able to look up an individual note in the database and to discover all the information available.
A second release of the environment will include updates that address some of the gaps in Thian's Register. For example, in the Seventh Issue (February 1864) sections of the Register, there are a number of gaps where the original Confederate Treasury Department records were lost or destroyed. The Editor has undertaken an extensive research effort of surviving notes to begin to piece together the missing data.
The ultimate vision for the application will be to incorporate an environment where collectors are able to store details - and images - of the notes in their own collection. This provides a great way to catalogue a collection, and to have access to all of the supporting information and reference materials provided by the application. However, it also provides the basis for building up a digital vault of all surviving Confederate Treasury notes; this would provide unparalleled research potential for experts. There are many, many open questions which can best be solved by examination and analysis of broad sets of surviving notes; with the power of technology and the proposed vault, this research could become feasible, and the results would ultimately benefit the community of collectors. Please note that this facility would be optional and full anonymity could be provided for members who wish to participate.
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