I'm trying to get this straight, since there seems to be a lot of overlap. There have been - for small size: United States Notes - Red Seal/SN Silver Certificates: --Blue Seal/SN --(Emergency)Brown Seal/SN w/Hawaii Overprint --(Emergency)Yellow Seal, Blue SN (North Africa) Federal & National Bank Notes - Brown Seal/SN w/bank overprint Federal Reserve Notes - Green Seal/SN, 1928 Series with Gold Redemption Gold Certificates - Gold Seal/SN Any other style of notes? lol
Large Size Federal Reserve Notes Red and blue seal. National Bank Notes Red, Blue and Gold Seals. Fed Reserve Notes Small Size Black seals. Large Size Treasury Notes with Large Red and Large Brown Seals even a Peach colored seal!! Fractional currency with red seals with different key length's and thicknesses.. Oh and the Small Size Fed Reserve note with the Dark Green and Light Green Seals! RickieB
Add to RickieB's post above: There were varieties of the Treasury notes 1. Demand notes - 1861 only 2. Legal Tender notes - 1862 - 1966 And then there were also the Refunding Certificates of 1878-1880 Also there are the very rare Interest Bearing Notes of 1861-1865
Small size notes: United States Notes/Legal Tender Notes - Red Seals Silver Certificates - Blue Seals Silver Certificates - Yellow seals North Africa Silver Certificates - Brown seals Hawaii ($1.00) Federal Reserve Notes - Green seals Federal Reserve Notes - Brown seals Hawaii ($5.00, $10.00 and $20.00) Federal Reserve Bank Notes - Brown seals 1929 National Bank Notes - Brown seals Gold Certificates - Gold seals Military Payment Certificates What do you mean by overlap?
overlap as in, there are blue seal silver certs, and brow seal silver certs, and then there are brown seal national notes. And then there are those 1928 notes that have the Gold Clause on them, and then there are Gold Certificates.
When the small-size notes first came out in 1929, there were five neatly distinguished types: Gold Certificates (yellow seal) Federal Reserve Notes (green seal) Silver Certificates (blue seal) United States Notes (red seal) National Currency (brown seal). All the confusion turned up later: Federal Reserve Bank Notes were resurrected in 1933 to provide an emergency supply of currency during the Depression; they were printed using the National Currency designs in order to avoid taking the time to create new plates. The title "Federal Reserve Bank Note" isn't even printed on the notes! But this one at least makes some degree of sense, since FRBNs are really a subtype of National Currency anyway; the old large-size ones were labelled both "Federal Reserve Bank Note" *and* "National Currency". Gold Certificates were discontinued in 1933 and Nationals in 1935. But then the seal colors that had been used for them were recycled on the special WWII printings in the '40s; and due to the way the series dating works, all those printings are dated either 1934 or 1935, so it looks like a lot more was going on at the same time than actually was. By the time these special notes were actually printed, there would've been precious few other yellow- or brown-seal notes in circulation for them to be confused with. (Quite a few brown-seal notes would turn up later, though; there were a lot of those FRBNs that were left over when they weren't all issued during the Depression, and they were finally put into circulation in the late '40s just to stop them from taking up space in the Fed's vaults. This is why they're still so common today, as collectible currency goes; people had a tendency to save them when they saw a new crisp 1929 bill circulating in 1949.)
You want to be careful with the term "Treasury Note"; it appears on several different unrelated issues. The earliest Legal Tender Notes were labelled Treasury Notes, but so were the even earlier interest-bearing issues, and the much later Coin Notes of 1890-91. As a result of all of these multiple appearances of the term, it's probably best not to list "Treasury Note" as a currency type at all; put each of these individual issues into the type where it really belongs. ("Coin Note" is a term that collectors seem to have invented for the 1890-91 issues, precisely in order to avoid the ambiguity of calling them "Treasury Notes". But that's not really a strike against it, since "Demand Note" is the same way--neither of these designations was ever actually printed on a note....)
Recent research by Peter Huntoon and others (myself included but Peter is really at the forefront on this) has revealed that the left over stock of small size Federal Reserve Bank Notes was issued during WWII as an emergency measure. According to records in the BEP it was done to save time in having to print new currency during the war when the manpower at the BEP was stretched by the war effort (particularly the printing of war bonds). There was considerable controversy over this at the time from economists and others who protested these notes entering the money supply. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any record of the serial numbers of the notes that were issued as the emergency currency during WWII so there is no way to distinguish the war-related issues from the 1933 issues.
Okay, quick question-What is the difference between a Federal Reserve Note and a Federal Reserve Bank Note (besides the seal colors)?
IIRC, technically the Federal Reserve Notes are "owned" by the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Reserve Bank Notes are "owned" by the individual Federal Reserve Banks.
In the days when there was more than one type of currency circulating, Federal Reserve Notes could be redeemed for "lawful money" at the US Treasury or any Federal Reserve Bank. Federal Reserve Bank Notes were an obligation of the bank that issued them and could only be redeemed at the US Treasury and the bank that issued them. The note issuing authority of the individual Federal Reserve Banks was similar to that of the National Banks. It was based on the backing of US government bonds held by the Federal Reserve Banks that issued the notes.
