RM Vivas
US Veteran
So let me tell you a story about how small the world can be…..
In the course of my arms career I have heard all sorts of stories about odd coincidences, blind luck, right place right time, etc.
I think we’ve all heard the story about the guy who guys to the local gunshop and finds the Garand he carried 50 years ago (and for those who will say that no one will remember their rifles serial number for that long, I call BS as does every other guy who did his piece for God and country. Mine was M16A2 #6554475.
Back in the early/mid 1990’s I was tracking down NYPD guns to build my collection. I came across a rather nice Colt Commando and purchased it.
I sent away for a letter on it and the letter confirmed it as an NYPD gun. When I eventually secured the purchase records I could find an entry for the gun but the name was not easily readable. Thus my quest to document the revolver hit a dead end and that dead end remained for 25 years or so.
Earlier this year I discovered a way to decipher and verify the illegible purchase records. I won’t get into the specific technique because its boring and not germane to the story; the important take away is that I was finally able to decipher the name of the Patrolman who owned the gun.
Having made the positive ID, I started looking to see what I could find on the fellow. I’m not any kind of detective but my Google-fu is strong. I’m a very firm believed in that you don’t always need to know an answer as long as you know where to find the answer.
I exhausted all the usual resources and figured that I was back at another dead end, this one a little further along the road than the last way.
Then, in one glorious weekend, it all came together.
I stumbled on a remarkably obscure online image database that had been put together by a college engineering department, likely as a proof-of-concept or class project sort of affair.
For database fodder, these blessed nerds chose back issues of The City Record, which they scanned and cataloged as ----SEARCHABLE--- .pdf files!
The City Record was/is the official publication of the City of New York. It is published every business day and contains all the business of NYC that has transacted in the past 24 hours. If you’re hired, fired, transferred, promoted, bidding a contract, being foreclosed on, taking a civil service exam or just having any involvement withy the City of New York, a record of it will appear in The City Record.
In amongst all the legal contract detritus, maps of eminent domain plans, and all the other business of the City That Never Sleeps, was a copy of each weeks Police Department Weekly Report.
That weekly report told what had happened the previous week in the Department, including lists of newly hired police recruits! Now I had my revolvers previous owners name, command, date of appointment and most importantly, a notation that he was hired as a wartime expedient Temporary Patrolman.
My goal now was to try to find an image of the fellow.
Here’s where the small word part comes into play.
I now live south of Albany, about 120 miles north of The City, in a very rural area. I started searching obituaries for information on the fellow and could find only one (he had a unique name).
The only obituary I could find was for a fellow with the same name as my guy, but with a slightly different spelling, who died about 15 years ago in a county just north of me.
The obituary was very long and very detailed. Nowhere in the obituary did it mention that the fellow had been a cop.
My experience in researching NYPD guns has been that the family always puts in the obit about how Dad was cop for 27 years, retired a CPT and in lieu of flowers, donations should be made to the Anchor Club or some similar Job-related charity or group. Nothing like that appeared in this obituary. Right off the bat, this was worrisome. I then noticed that all the blood descendants of the fellow were female, meaning that the easily trackable unique surname had more than likely morphed into some annoyingly common post-marriage name. With my luck it’d be Smith or Jones or something vexingly similar and abundant.
As I read down to the list of grand-daughters, I found a girl with a very unique last name. It started with a Q for crying out loud, so you know this would be easier to find than any other relative.
I read on a little further and saw that this girl was described as “…beloved grand-daughter, (unique Q name), of (name of the town I live in now)….”
Holy ****! This guys granddaughter lives in the same town as me!!!!!
Ok, now I’m in full stalker mode. Do a search on the granddaughters unique name and the name of the town I live in and find out she was employee of the month a few years back at a satellite office of the local hospital and that she has worked in that office for about 15 years.
The satellite office of the hospital is so close that you can see my house from the office parking lot!
In fact, 12 years ago when I was in nursing school, I did a clinical rotation in that office! Her and I probably worked on something together!!!!
OK, so now I have to contact her. We play phone tag for about a week and the whole time I’m thinking about how to broach the subject with her.
Finally, I get her on the phone. I explain that I am a history major at SUNY-Albany and am doing some research on NYC civil servants during WW2. Can you tell me what you grandfather did during WW2?
She paused a moment and said, “He didn’t serve in the military during WW2, he was a policeman in NY”.
At that moment a feeling of calmness swept over me and I told her that I have her grandfathers service revolver and had been looking for his family for many years. She was shocked. We chatted some more and she said she had a sister (another of my fellows granddaughters) who was big into family history and would forward my contact info to her.
Fast forward a couple weeks and I meet the other granddaughter and her husband at a local diner. Remember I said it was a small world? Turns out her husband is one of the instructors at SUNY-Albany although not one of mine.
We chat and finally she pulls out her phone and shows me pictures of her grandfather and amongst all the pictures of him later in life and enjoying time with the family in the decades from 1940 onwards, is a full length image of him in summer uniform with his holstered revolver visible and the same shield number on his chest and cap device as is stamped on the backstrap of the revolver!
So I bought a revolver 25 years ago, moved all over the US, and eventually settled down and bought a place that’s a 6 minute drive from a medical office where I once rubbed shoulders with the guys granddaughter and attended school where the other granddaughters husband teaches.
It’s a small world. I wouldn’t want to have to mow it or anything, but it really is a small world.
RM Vivas
In the course of my arms career I have heard all sorts of stories about odd coincidences, blind luck, right place right time, etc.
I think we’ve all heard the story about the guy who guys to the local gunshop and finds the Garand he carried 50 years ago (and for those who will say that no one will remember their rifles serial number for that long, I call BS as does every other guy who did his piece for God and country. Mine was M16A2 #6554475.
Back in the early/mid 1990’s I was tracking down NYPD guns to build my collection. I came across a rather nice Colt Commando and purchased it.
I sent away for a letter on it and the letter confirmed it as an NYPD gun. When I eventually secured the purchase records I could find an entry for the gun but the name was not easily readable. Thus my quest to document the revolver hit a dead end and that dead end remained for 25 years or so.
Earlier this year I discovered a way to decipher and verify the illegible purchase records. I won’t get into the specific technique because its boring and not germane to the story; the important take away is that I was finally able to decipher the name of the Patrolman who owned the gun.
Having made the positive ID, I started looking to see what I could find on the fellow. I’m not any kind of detective but my Google-fu is strong. I’m a very firm believed in that you don’t always need to know an answer as long as you know where to find the answer.
I exhausted all the usual resources and figured that I was back at another dead end, this one a little further along the road than the last way.
Then, in one glorious weekend, it all came together.
I stumbled on a remarkably obscure online image database that had been put together by a college engineering department, likely as a proof-of-concept or class project sort of affair.
For database fodder, these blessed nerds chose back issues of The City Record, which they scanned and cataloged as ----SEARCHABLE--- .pdf files!
The City Record was/is the official publication of the City of New York. It is published every business day and contains all the business of NYC that has transacted in the past 24 hours. If you’re hired, fired, transferred, promoted, bidding a contract, being foreclosed on, taking a civil service exam or just having any involvement withy the City of New York, a record of it will appear in The City Record.
In amongst all the legal contract detritus, maps of eminent domain plans, and all the other business of the City That Never Sleeps, was a copy of each weeks Police Department Weekly Report.
That weekly report told what had happened the previous week in the Department, including lists of newly hired police recruits! Now I had my revolvers previous owners name, command, date of appointment and most importantly, a notation that he was hired as a wartime expedient Temporary Patrolman.
My goal now was to try to find an image of the fellow.
Here’s where the small word part comes into play.
I now live south of Albany, about 120 miles north of The City, in a very rural area. I started searching obituaries for information on the fellow and could find only one (he had a unique name).
The only obituary I could find was for a fellow with the same name as my guy, but with a slightly different spelling, who died about 15 years ago in a county just north of me.
The obituary was very long and very detailed. Nowhere in the obituary did it mention that the fellow had been a cop.
My experience in researching NYPD guns has been that the family always puts in the obit about how Dad was cop for 27 years, retired a CPT and in lieu of flowers, donations should be made to the Anchor Club or some similar Job-related charity or group. Nothing like that appeared in this obituary. Right off the bat, this was worrisome. I then noticed that all the blood descendants of the fellow were female, meaning that the easily trackable unique surname had more than likely morphed into some annoyingly common post-marriage name. With my luck it’d be Smith or Jones or something vexingly similar and abundant.
As I read down to the list of grand-daughters, I found a girl with a very unique last name. It started with a Q for crying out loud, so you know this would be easier to find than any other relative.
I read on a little further and saw that this girl was described as “…beloved grand-daughter, (unique Q name), of (name of the town I live in now)….”
Holy ****! This guys granddaughter lives in the same town as me!!!!!
Ok, now I’m in full stalker mode. Do a search on the granddaughters unique name and the name of the town I live in and find out she was employee of the month a few years back at a satellite office of the local hospital and that she has worked in that office for about 15 years.
The satellite office of the hospital is so close that you can see my house from the office parking lot!
In fact, 12 years ago when I was in nursing school, I did a clinical rotation in that office! Her and I probably worked on something together!!!!
OK, so now I have to contact her. We play phone tag for about a week and the whole time I’m thinking about how to broach the subject with her.
Finally, I get her on the phone. I explain that I am a history major at SUNY-Albany and am doing some research on NYC civil servants during WW2. Can you tell me what you grandfather did during WW2?
She paused a moment and said, “He didn’t serve in the military during WW2, he was a policeman in NY”.
At that moment a feeling of calmness swept over me and I told her that I have her grandfathers service revolver and had been looking for his family for many years. She was shocked. We chatted some more and she said she had a sister (another of my fellows granddaughters) who was big into family history and would forward my contact info to her.
Fast forward a couple weeks and I meet the other granddaughter and her husband at a local diner. Remember I said it was a small world? Turns out her husband is one of the instructors at SUNY-Albany although not one of mine.
We chat and finally she pulls out her phone and shows me pictures of her grandfather and amongst all the pictures of him later in life and enjoying time with the family in the decades from 1940 onwards, is a full length image of him in summer uniform with his holstered revolver visible and the same shield number on his chest and cap device as is stamped on the backstrap of the revolver!
So I bought a revolver 25 years ago, moved all over the US, and eventually settled down and bought a place that’s a 6 minute drive from a medical office where I once rubbed shoulders with the guys granddaughter and attended school where the other granddaughters husband teaches.
It’s a small world. I wouldn’t want to have to mow it or anything, but it really is a small world.
RM Vivas
