whats the significance of the serial number and all the other numbers on American paper money like the number that shows up four times. basicly im asking how to read a bill
The 4 numbers in black correspond to the Federal Reserve Bank's district number. The letter A through L in the black seal corresponds to the same. Here are the districts: 1st District (A) - Boston 2nd District (B) - New York 3rd District (C) - Philadelphia 4th District (D) - Cleveland 5th District (E) - Richmond 6th District (F) - Atlanta 7th District (G) - Chicago 8th District (H) - St. Louis 9th District (I) - Minneapolis 10th District (J) - Kansas City 11th District (K) - Dallas 12th District (L) - San Francisco So if the letter G appears in the Federal Reserve Bank seal, then the number will be 7.
Assuming I can interpret the question correctly.... Up until 1983, the BEP always sent newly printed Federal Reserve Notes to their "home" district to be placed into circulation. Beginning in 1983, they started shipping them more randomly. That way they didn't have to be quite as precise about what was printed when. In the very early days of the Federal Reserve system, the FRBs would actually sort all their *circulated* notes by district, and ship them all back to their home district for reissue. I'm not sure exactly how long that went on, but it ended a long time ago.
I wasn't either. That explains when the 2009 series $1 notes came out I was finding a glut of San Frans and didn't get a Philly one until almost 6-8 months later!
I still find that a majority of the notes I come across are from SF. Is that because SF always has a lot of notes printed, or is the distribution still biased enough to show a difference?
The serial numbers are only for book keeping of the inventory that is printed. All other numbers are 1. Plate position. 2. Federal reserve districts. 3. Where printed. 4. Series year. I hope this helps.:thumb:
Yes, there's still a bias in favor of shipping notes to the "correct" district when that happens to be convenient. That's especially true for the big districts (B, F, L), since their notes are in production a large fraction of the time. Also, most of the time, the BEP facility at Washington prints notes for the eastern districts, and the BEP facility at Fort Worth prints notes for the western districts. So if you live on the west coast, then you'll get a lot of L and a bit of GHIJK, and you won't often get ABCDE since they're generally printed at the other end of the country. Vice versa if you live on the east coast. (But recently the BEP's production schedule has been wonky because they're busy stockpiling new $100's and such, and as a result Fort Worth has been printing nearly all of the $1's for quite a few months now. So even on the west coast, you might see more $1's from eastern districts than you would've a few years ago.)
Yup, I see way more FW notes than DC notes. Maybe a 3:1 ratio overall. And plenty of Dallas and Atlanta (particularly series 2009) notes.
