Williams, Raymond "Ray"
Born in Queens, New York. Attended Monmouth College. Married Diane Russo on September 20, 1986. Employed as an electronic technician; with Perdue Radio Co. 1967 to 1990; Woodbridge Stereo 1990-2000; self employed 2000 to 2019; retired in 2019.
President of the Colonial Coin Collectors Club 2000 to 2010. He contributes the “Early American Money” column to The Numismatist. Past President of Trenton Numismatic Club and New Jersey Numismatic Society.
Fellow of the ANS. Co-author of EAC “Grading Guide to Early American Coppers”. Received ANA Glen Smedley Memorial Award. Member of the Rittenhouse Society.
He studies and collects coins, paper money and medals of the British American colonies and the Confederation era.
bio by correspondence 2019, 2023
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6/16/2017Ford Collection Topical Index
John J. Ford would undoubtedly be pleased to know that the twenty-four auction catalogs of his collections have become one of the most important references in many numismatists library. The decade long Stack’s, and eventually Stack’s-Bowers, auction event ran from 2003 to 2013. Ford was known for his thorough research and encyclopaedic knowledge of everything from stamps to handguns, and of course numismatics. So thorough was Ford’s research, the staff at Stack’s would say, of the then teenage employee, “If John wanted the ashtray on his desk, there had to be some previously undiscovered value in it”.
The Stack’s Ford catalogs frequently trade online for $10 to $20 each, with the hard cover editions selling in the $50 range, making a full set a $250 to $1,000 investment. Recently, thanks to the Newman Numismatic Portal, the entire set has been digitized and made available at no cost to collectors and researchers. The catalogs can also be downloaded as “Portable Document Format” (PDF) files for offline use.
His collections included U.S. colonial coins, U.S. colonial medals (Betts medals), American historical medals issued prior to World War II, Indian peace medals, pioneer and territorial gold, assay ingots, territorial tokens, Hard Times and merchant tokens, post trader tokens, sutler tokens, U.S. counterstamps, fractional currency, encased postage, colonial and continental currency, western obsolete currency, U.S. obsolete currency and federal notes issued prior to 1861.
The catalogs contain a wealth of information and are worthy of a Sunday morning read, or as a source for academic researchers. To enable both leisurely perusal and targeted research the catalogs have been arranged into two tables. The first table provides a link to each auction by auction number. (Note: The Ford auctions are often referenced by Roman Numbers, for ease of use the Arabic conversion is also supplied in the table). Because of the vastness of the collection specific collecting areas may appear in more than one auction catalog. To make finding materials easier across the auctions the second table provides a basic index of subject areas and the related catalogs. Perhaps in the future a complete and searchable datafile will be available to researchers to gain even deeper insights into this once-in-a-generation collection. (Stuart Hanebuth)
This index was created by Stuart Hanebuth and includes additions from Ray Williams.
NOTE: For optimal use of the index, we recommend that you download and use the .pdf version at https://archive.org/download/FordTopicIndex. The .pdf version of the document contains hyperlinks that connect directly to the various Ford catalogs.
