Violin and bow makers, mostly American, with the old book behind every fact.
Look up a name and you get what the books actually printed, which page it was printed on, and whether a person has checked it yet. Nothing here is written from memory.
Those are the records worked on most recently. The number under each name is how many separate sources stand behind it. Browse all makers, or the books they come from.
What is here
- 605maker records
- Another 4,329 are in progress, waiting for a person to check them. Where one is shown at all, its page gives the name and which books print it and nothing more: nothing a draft says is shown anywhere, and in the public data files they carry a note saying nobody has signed them off. A further 805 were retired in place or merged into another record, and are kept on file rather than deleted.
- 2,658lines on those records
- 6 documented · 2,642 reported · 8 disputed · 2 corrected. Every line that says something names the document it came from. The 7 rows with no source record what is not known, and a gap has nothing to cite. Counting the unchecked drafts too, there are 12,450.
- 1,978sources
- 41 of them are primary, meaning documents from the makers’ own time. 39 were read by a person looking at a photo of the page, not from machine text. Every source record says which. That detail is easy to note while a book is open and impossible to work out later.
- 14,768names indexed from sources
- 3,623 of them have no maker record here yet. That number is the work still to do. It is shown on purpose: it is the honest measure of how much of this trade is still unwritten.
- 10instruments on the register
- Each entry says how it is known, and an owner’s report stays an owner’s report. Nothing here is authenticated, valued or attributed to a maker.
These numbers are counted fresh every time the page loads. Nobody types them in. On a site about getting facts right, a stale number on the front page would be the worst mistake we could make.
Those 605 published records have 4,329 more behind them, drafted and waiting to be checked against their sources. The state of the work shows the whole pipeline, count by count, and where another pair of careful eyes would help.
Every line on a maker’s page says three things: what the source says, which book and page it came from, and how that page was read. How to read a maker record takes one line apart and explains the labels.
Why this exists
The standard book on American violin makers came out in 1986. It is out of print and has never been put online. Some of its entries are wrong in ways you can trace: a copied date, a medal of the wrong colour. Hundreds of makers have a two-line entry there and nothing else.
This site rebuilds those entries one maker at a time, with the source next to every fact. When we get something wrong, the fix is logged on the record where anyone can see it. Nothing is quietly edited.
Two things this site does not do. It does not tell you what an instrument is worth, and it does not tell you whether the label inside it is genuine. It keeps the paper trail on each maker, gaps included.
Where to start
- Makers — search by name, or browse a random sample.
- Sources — every book we cite, each one saying how it was read.
- The 1916 trade directory — all 413 entries, typed out in full. Each one says which page it was printed on.
- The state of the work — how much is done, how much is waiting, and how you can help.
A note on that 1916 directory. Its publisher said every entry was written and approved by the man it describes, then refused to guarantee any of it. So it is good evidence of what four hundred tradesmen said about themselves, and weak evidence of what was true. We keep it as testimony, not fact.
The whole site is also available as one downloadable file, so anyone can quote it exactly. Corrections are welcome, with a source.