Searching Builder Name Forms and Successor Names in the OHS Pipe Organ Database

The register files a firm under every name form it traded under and does not normalize those forms, so one builder entity cannot be assumed to be the whole firm. A name form can be a legal corporate name, a later successor name adopted after a reorganization, or an alternate nameplate wording, and the database gives each its own record. As of September 1, 2026, ‘Schantz Organ Co.’ (/builders/7079), ‘Schantz Organ Company’ (/builders/8073, noted ‘alternate nameplate’), ‘Schantz’ (/builders/7585), ‘Schantz Overview’ (/builders/7763) and ‘A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co.’ (/builders/8) are five separate entities among the fifteen that carry the Schantz name.

For Wicks the split mirrors the firm’s own filings. United States patents filed from 1928 to 1933 name the assignee as Wicks Pipe Organ Co., a patent filed in 1939 names the assignee as Wicks Organ Co., and the database files instruments under both names as separate builder entities. Reaching one of those entities does not reach the other, and no search that stops at the first entity found can be called finished.

An alternate name form is a variant spelling, abbreviation or nameplate wording of one trading name, and the register files it as a separate entity with its own holdings. As of September 1, 2026, the Wicks firm’s instrument records are divided across three entities that share the same ‘Type’, the same ‘Active’ range and the same Highland, Illinois description: ‘Wicks Organ Co.’ (/builders/7431) reports 2,844 Instruments, ‘Wicks Pipe Organ Co.’ (/builders/6725) reports 233, and ‘Wicks’ (/builders/7432), noted ‘(Alternate nameplate)’, reports 113. The largest holding sits under the shorter name rather than the fullest corporate name, so the entity with the most formal-looking name is not a safe place to stop.

The alternate-nameplate entities are not dormant. On the same date, /instruments/73792 is filed as ‘Schantz Organ Company (Opus 2351, 2025)’ and /instruments/73874 as ‘Schantz Organ Co. (Opus 2350, 2025)’, so two consecutive opus numbers from one firm sit under two different builder entities. A reader who takes one entity’s instruments as the firm’s recent work misses the other.

A successor name is a later trading name of the same firm, and the database files it as its own builder entity while labeling the succession in the entity note rather than merging the records. As of September 1, 2026, ‘Austin Organ Co.’ (/builders/224) carries the note ‘Hartford, Connecticut, 1898-1937; Firm name from inception until 1937.’ and ‘Austin Organs, Inc.’ (/builders/7360) carries ‘Firm name after reorganization in 1937.’; a third entity, ‘Austin Family Overview’ (/builders/656), holds the family narrative. The two trading-name entities report separate holdings on the same date, 2,108 Instruments against 945, and neither figure includes the other.

Schantz shows the same pattern from the earlier side. The register treats ‘A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co.’ as the firm name from 1892 to 1946, succeeded by ‘Schantz Organ Co.’, and as of September 1, 2026, it holds 266 instrument records and 25 console records under the earlier name. The note that states the succession is how the database tells you that a search on the current name has not finished; the name changes are register facts, and the firm’s fuller history is not this page’s subject.

A long lineage multiplies the entities, and the register does not tell you how many there are before you search. As of September 2, 2026, the builder register distinguishes at least eight Steere-lineage name forms with separate date ranges, among them ‘J. W. Steer(e)’, ‘Steer & Turner [J.W. Steer]’, two entries titled ‘J. W. Steere & Sons’ with different dates, and ‘Steere Organ Company’. The spelling shifts between Steer and Steere, so a search on the fuller spelling misses part of the lineage, and the register’s own entries overlap in ways it does not reconcile.

Odell shows the counting consequence in its simplest form. As of September 2, 2026, the database indexes Odell instruments under at least two builder identifiers, builderID 3093 titled ‘J. H. & C. S. Odell & Co.’ and builderID 7552 titled ‘J. H. & C. S. Odell’, so any count of Odell records has to be taken across both rather than from one builder page. Whether those two identifiers mark a deliberate distinction between corporate eras or an unmerged duplicate entity is not established from the register, and further Odell identifiers may exist; a merger or reorganization is something an entity note may label, not something two identifiers prove.

Search the builder register on the shortest distinctive fragment of the name and read every entity the match returns. As of September 1, 2026, the builder search form exposes six typed fields, ‘Name’, ‘City’, ‘State/Province Code’, ‘Country Code’, ‘Active From’ and ‘Active Until’, plus four checkbox filters (‘Show Only Currently Active Builders’, ‘Entry Has Image(s)’, ‘Entry Has Document(s)’, ‘Entry Has Webpage(s)’) and a 16-option sort control; it offers no filter on an entity’s ‘Type’ value even though ‘Type’ is displayed on every builder card and record.

The database’s own matching guidance, printed on its instrument search surface, is ‘Less text is more helpful for best results’, and the reason it holds for the builder register is that the name match returns every entity whose name contains the string you typed. As of September 1, 2026, a builder-name search on ‘Austin’ returned ‘Austin W. La Marche’ and ‘Mark Austin Pipe Organs’ alongside the Hartford firm’s two corporate names, which is the reach you want when hunting for name forms even though it costs some sorting afterward. Leave ‘Active From’, ‘Active Until’ and ‘Show Only Currently Active Builders’ empty on a first pass, because they filter on a structured field that can be ‘Unknown’.

Each entity’s detail page then gives you what to record. As read on six builder records on September 1, 2026, a builder detail page renders the entity name as heading, ‘Active: <start> – <end>’, ‘Type: <value>’, buttons reading VIEW INSTRUMENTS and VIEW EXTANT INSTRUMENTS, a ‘Distinction:’ label, a free-text place-and-period note, conditional ‘View Notes’, ‘View Images’ and ‘View Documents’ links, and a ‘Database Specs:’ block giving Instruments, Consoles and Blowers counts. Record the numeric /builders/<id> path and the note text for every entity before opening a single instrument record, because the note is where a succession or an alternate nameplate is labeled.

The numeric record ID is the only reliable discriminator between two entities that display the same name. As of September 1, 2026, two builder entities both display ‘Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co.’: /builders/52, noted ‘Boston, Massachusetts, 1932-1971’ with ‘Active 1932 – 1971’, reports 975 Instruments, 84 Consoles and 0 Blowers, while /builders/7993, noted ‘Boston, Massachusetts, 1983.’ with ‘Active 1983 – Unknown’, reports 5 Instruments, 0 Consoles and 0 Blowers. A citation that says only ‘Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co.’ cannot be traced to either one, so carry the ID.

Where you find the ID depends on which result view you are looking at. On the same date, the builder search renders results in a TABLE view whose columns are ID, Name, Type, Details, Active From, Active Until and Resources, and a CARDS view that omits the ID column and instead prints a postal city/state line under the name where one is stored. A field absent from one view may still exist in the other, and the card line can disagree with the entity’s own note: the ‘Wicks’ entity at /builders/7432 prints ‘Salt Lake City, UT 84124 UT, US’ in CARDS view, which conflicts with its note ‘Highland, Illinois from 1906.’ and repeats the state code, while its detail page shows no address line at all. Switch to TABLE view to read IDs, and open the detail page rather than trusting a card.

A free-text result count is a substring match across every builder entity whose name contains the string, so it spans every matching entity at once. As of September 1, 2026, the instrument query builder=Schantz reported ‘Showing 2,346 Results’ while the ‘Schantz Organ Co.’ entity at /builders/7079 reported 1,878 Instruments in its ‘Database Specs’ block; the gap is not held by that one entity, and it comes from the rest of the match.

Unrelated name collisions widen the match further. On September 1, 2026, an Austin builder-name search returned 21 entities, six of them unrelated people or firms such as ‘Austin W. La Marche’ (/builders/3510) and ‘Mark Austin Pipe Organs’ (/builders/8481), and two of them service firms typed ‘Service Person’.

The same substring behavior governs the instrument search’s builder parameter. On September 2, 2026, an instrument search with the builder parameter set to ‘Casavant’ reported ‘Showing 4,836 Results’, and that figure is not a count of instruments Casavant built. The parameter matches every entity whose name contains the string, the returned set includes records whose current builder is another firm and whose Casavant attribution appears only on the Originally line, and one physical organ can appear several times as separate revision records. The same name on the builder register returned 12 entities that day, including a ‘Casavant’ entity described as a ‘Utility name, used when exact nameplate form is not known’ and two alternate-nameplate entities, so no single entity’s record set stands for the firm’s work either.

An entity’s own holdings figure in the ‘Database Specs’ block is a different number with its own limits, and what it does and does not count is explained on OHS Pipe Organ Database limits: sampled records, attribution, and update boundaries.

Not every entity a builder search returns is a firm that built organs, and the ‘Type’ value does not sort them cleanly. As of September 1, 2026, observed ‘Type’ values include ‘Builder’, ‘Employee or Independent Contractor’, ‘Corporate Officer’, ‘Service Person’ and ‘Unknown’; ‘Builder’ is applied both to corporate firms and to individual people, and ‘Unknown’ is applied to substantive entities including family-overview records. The register also carries ‘Overview’ entities that hold a firm or family narrative rather than a trading name: ‘Schantz Overview’ (/builders/7763) is typed ‘Builder’, shows ‘Active: Unknown – Unknown’, reports 0 Instruments, 0 Consoles and 0 Blowers, and still offers VIEW INSTRUMENTS and VIEW EXTANT INSTRUMENTS buttons, while ‘Austin Family Overview’ (/builders/656) is typed ‘Unknown’. An Overview entity is worth reading for its note, but it is not where instrument records live.

The ‘Active’ range is a database field, not evidence of trading. On the same date it can be ‘Unknown’ at one or both ends even where the same record’s free-text note states explicit dates: ‘A. B. DeCourcy & Co.’ reads ‘Boston, Massachusetts, 1908-1932.’ against ‘Active: Unknown – Unknown’, and ‘Schantz Organ Co.’ reads ‘Orrville, Ohio from 1873’ against ‘Active: Unknown – Present’. An ‘Active: … – Present’ value does not show that the entity currently operates: ‘Austin Organ Co.’ shows ‘Active: Unknown – Present’ while its note reads ‘Firm name from inception until 1937’, and ‘The Reuter-Schwarz Organ Co.’ shows the same value against a note reading ‘Highland, Illinois, 1917-1919. Lawrence, Kansas, 1919-1920.’ Treat the note as the register’s statement and the ‘Active’ range as a structured field that can disagree with it.

When the database’s own entity note and the firm’s own chronology date a name change differently, carry both accounts with their attribution and do not pick one. The Pipe Organ Database builder note for the earlier Schantz name states that the initial ‘T’ was dropped from the firm’s name in 1892, when Edison F. and Oliver A. Schantz joined, with most family members retaining it in their personal names until about 1899; the Schantz-authored chronology published in The American Organist in September 2023 states that the family name was changed from Tschantz to Schantz in 1899 to ease pronunciation as the business expanded. The two accounts may be reconcilable as firm name versus personal names, but they are stated differently and are kept separate here.

The same note dates the renaming to Schantz Organ Co. to 1946, the year the register’s succession also uses. That note draws on an email from a serving Schantz Organ Co. officer, so it is not independent of the company; that is a reason to record its provenance alongside its dates, not a reason to prefer or discount it.

Once every entity for the firm is on your list with its numeric ID, the builder register has done its job and the next steps belong to other pages. The instrument and location search, the anatomy of an instrument record, and how to cite one are covered on How to Use the OHS Pipe Organ Database; how much weight a holdings figure or a headline attribution carries is the subject of the limits page linked above. This page’s method ends at the entity list and makes no finding about any particular instrument; when the entity list will be used in a project on the instrument itself, keep it and the IDs with the project file so the records question can be reopened later against the same entities.