Seeking Opinions From Revenue Collectors

I have been working on publishing a new online database for 1862 – 1874 Revenue insurance cancellations (eventually with census capabilities). The first task was to build a database of the existing, known Tolman cancellations. I was lucky to hook up with Bill Halstead (thank you Southpaw!) who owns much of the original Tolman efforts including his documentation. In working with Bill, we have uncovered some errors and quite a few cancels that did not make it into the Tolman book "Insurance Cancellations On United States Revenue Stamps of The 1862 – 1874 Issues".

Additionally there are now hundreds, if not more, of new cancellations that have surfaced since Tolman did his work. We want to be able to include them with new numbers.

To add new insurance cancellations and give them numbers than we have to do one of two things; either be completely faithful to Tolman's numbering approach or modify it with improvements. After spending endless hours with Tolman's effort I think that one of the biggest challenges is the Tolman 'three level' numbering categorization. The following is an example…

The third level of the numbering system will explode into the thousands of additional Tolman numbers if his approach is followed when adding new cancels. I am thinking that the third level should be dropped. As seen with the A9D and the A9D1 above; they can be thought of as being the same cancel (A9D) since both the manuscript cancels have 'Aetna Ins Co' in the first line.

The other issue I am having is that Tolman also used this last number field in this way.


As you can see, the only difference between the two cancels is in the date slug. If the difference was simply between the day and month, I would call the cancel the same (I13). There are not a lot of examples of this but it appears that Tolman wanted to differentiate this cancel because it carries the year at top, followed by day and month. My thinking is that the second cancel ought to be assigned the next Tolman second level letter instead of the third level number (as shown below). This would stay consistent with a design change in the cancel.


Please keep in mind that the new database will carry two Tolman numbers; (cross index) the original numbering would always be shown and the new numbers would be the same for the majority of cancels. But the new number field would hold the new cancels that have been added and any improvements that are implemented. While we are still populating the database with images, SCF folks can have a seek peek at the new database here http://www.stampsmarter.com/rev_can...landing.html

I am seeking opinions on dropping the Tolman third level and modifying a few of the existing Tolman numbers by reclassifying them as level 2 numbers. I would greatly appreciate any feedback on this.
Don
APS #094826

Wow Don, this is interesting even for non collectors of these. And just a bit of help, please put a word in between "consistent" and "a" just above the last picture.

Peter

Peter,
Opps. Done
thanks!
Don

I totally agree with your assessment of the manuscript cancels. No matter how much handwritten cancels look alike, it would be virtually impossible for any two to be identical. A single number should be assigned to handwritten cancels and be done with it.

Don, I agree with the idea of ascribing a single number to all manuscript cancels since there could potentially be hundreds of variations. I think I count 12 for Aetna on the sample page at stampsmarter. And unless I am missing something, elimination of the third level sounds like a good idea.

Don, My simple suggestion would to be to add ability to advance a page at the bottom of the scroll to avoid having to scroll up to move to next page. The numbering system you suggest makes good sense to me. This will be a valuable asset to cancel collectors that dont have the books or means to get them.

Thank you all for the feedback.
rwoodennickel - I added a page navigator at the bottom of page as suggested, thanks
Don

As someone new to collecting insurance cancels on first issue revenues, I must thank you for this incredible resource. Since there are so many different cancels, I now have to figure out what I want to collect within this topic.

Hi Don - so do you now have all cancels you know of added at this time? If I find one not listed should I pass it on?

Hi Randall!
Short answer; no.

Longer answer; there currently are 1880 cancels in the database. I have not yet added the 'third level' Tolman varieties. I also currently have several hundred company/agents which are not Tolman listed nor entered into the database.

I spoke with Bill H. yesterday and explored how we might want to proceed with the numbering of these additions. (He also has a very large collection of revenue railroad cancels and we might make another database to catalog and hold these.)

Frankly the Tolman numbering method is errr, 'less than ideal'. We are considering a complete overhaul and/or a much improved new numbering system.

At this point you might want to hold off a few more weeks until we get the new cancels we already have entered.

If anyone else wants to participate in these development projects please let me know!
Don

Hi Don,

Excellent job!

I had started doing something similar with the Tolman railroad cancels a few years back, not expanding the listings, but putting them into an online searchable database. I had intended, once done, to start on the insurance cancels. As with many of my projects, time became an issue. The novelty and development wore off and all that remained was the grunt work (image manipulation and data entry), which at the end of a long work day or work week isn't what I want to spend my time doing.

You can see the initial attempt here:

http://www.revenue-collector.com/railroad.shtml

Not as polished or capable as your DB.

A couple of comments and suggestions:

1. I agree that having a separate number for every single variant, e.g., inverted day, month, and/or year slugs, seems excessively granular. Those can be treated as a "v" or "var" suffix to the base type, and if you really wanted to, use v1, v2, v3, etc. At least then you preserve the link to the base cancel type.

2. When Eric Jackson and I met at Chicagopex last year, he asked me if I was going to continue working on mine, because he actually used it periodically for the cancel text search. Mine differs from yours in that (1) I include everything but the date in the data to be searched, including the city and state, and (2) I do not do any whole word matching; I allow fragments and don't parse whitespace (I include whitespace in the data entry for readability, but when searching for a match, I strip all whitespace and punctuation from both search query and target. Why? Because frequently these cancels are found as partial strikes rather than complete cancels, especially on smaller denomination stamps, so you don't know what part of the cancel the collector has in front of them. Being able to search for any small portion is a boon to the collector.

Your database currently comes close, but it does use whitespace as a limiter, which on many cancels can be open to interpretation. Also, you don't include the city and state text in the searchable cancel verbage, which I think is an omission, as that text does appear as part of the cancel and if you only have a fragment, that could be important.

Using the Abington Mutual Fire Insurance Co. (A3) cancel as an example, in my opinion the search queries "NGTON MU" and "NGTONMU" should return positive results. The former does, the latter does not.

Also, doing searches for "NGTON MASS" or "NGTONMASS" should also return positive results as that is part of the cancel text as well, and could be a fragment that shows up on a stamp.

Minor quibbles that presumably can be tweaked by the search processing.

I can happily not feel guilty about pursuing my incarnation. :) Well done!

P.S. There are similar line drawings of ship cancels that Tolman did in a TAR article (which is downloadable from my website).

I'd love to see this approach extended to mining, proprietary, banking, etc.... a lot of work to be done on those, however, since there are no Tolmanesque volumes to work from that have the line drawings already done. Quite a few could be gleaned from images on my website though, by processing them through retroreveal. Lot of grunt work...

P.P.S. Bill purchased quite a large number of insurance cancels from me last year. There were still quite a few that I wasn't willing to part with just because of aesthetics or the stamps in question. When you get to the point of adding unlisted cancels, please let me know if any of the ones in the various collections I have imaged en masse but not yet processed, would be useful and I can pull them and make hi-res images.

http://www.revenue-collector.com/insurancecoll/

http://www.revenue-collector.com/railroadmisc/

http://www.revenue-collector.com/chicagopex/

http://www.revenue-collector.com/2016cancels/

Dan, a few years ago, when I was becoming more serious about 1st issue revenues and discovered your site, I also used your railroad cancel database for identification purposes. Not understanding the effort involved and thinking it was somehow only a matter of copying and pasting the Shellabear/Tolman reference work, I kept wondering when you were going to get around to adding the first half of the alphabet! Now I know. And thanks to Don for all his work on the insurance cancels!

Dan,
Thanks for the feedback. The advanced filtering on the database includes fields for city and state although you are correct that they are not included in the cancel verbiage field. So if a user is working from a partial cancel such as this one…


They can enter variables in multiple filter fields such as shown here…



This narrows the search so they should be able to identify their stamp. The filter defaults to the clause 'contains' but other filter clauses are available to the users as shown here…


Your point is very true about the cancels being open to interpretation for white spaces and punctuations; manuscript cancels also prone to subjective influences. The filter tool puts a bit of burden on the user to know and understand how use the tool. To make things a bit clearer, I am currently working on a set of instructional 'help' videos.

Please note that there is also a 'quick search' tool. This search is broader than the filter feature since it hits across every field in the database. So for example if a user enters 'ork' in the search field it will return anything in any field as shown below…


I am, of course, re-using a lot of the coding that I already had in place for the other Stamp Smarter databases (US Plate Number, Schermack Control Perfins census, 3¢ 1851-57 Plating Initiative, Washington/Franklin Identifier Tool, World Stamp Identifier, and the US Revenue Documentary and Stock Transfer Serial Numbers). So the good news is that once a user learns the filter capabilities they can apply them across the board.

The best news is that this is all done with a SQL database foundation. Moving forward no one else should have to re-enter this data ever again, the SQL format allows this data to be useable for decades to come.
Don

You guys are good! If you need any help processing, cleaning up or "restoring or reconstructing" cancels let me know. It's the least I can do.

I just added the educational video for the filtering tool, it runs about 2 minutes. Link added as shown below...



Note, you may have to 'refresh' (F5 key) your browser to see the newly modified web page.

http://www.stampsmarter.com/rev_can...landing.html

Don