Web history is full of famous sites that vanished because nobody thought to copy the old files before the server went dark. Sixguns.com survived for a more human reason: somebody noticed it disappearing and cared enough to do something about it. That somebody was Albert C. Fernandez.
This page is not an obituary. Albert is part of the living Sixguns community. It is a tribute to stewardship — to the years when an old HTML site full of John Taffin articles, photographs, tests, guest writers and sixgun history remained on the public web because one man kept paying attention to it.
In 2023 Robert published an interview with Albert at Full30 under the title SIXGUNS.COM – A TRIBUTE. Full30 is no longer a dependable long-term home, so Sixguns is carrying the historical substance of that interview forward here while leaving the original 2023 publication linked for as long as it survives.
The rescue before the restoration
The remarkable part of Albert’s story is that he was preserving Sixguns long before preservation became a formal project.
In the 2023 interview, Albert described finding Sixguns.com when the web was still young and reading John Taffin alongside the older names that had shaped his interest in sixguns. He began noticing that the site could disappear for months. When it came back, he made a copy of the entire site with a web-tracking program, then spent a long time locating the owner. He eventually acquired the site without a purchase price and said he had hosted and maintained it ever since. He dated his takeover to 2009.
That single decision explains why so much material exists for us to restore today. The present archive still contains Taffin’s galleries and tests, the Shooting Range, the Bunk House, the Branding Crew, Chris Schei’s stories, photographs, PDFs and hundreds of handmade pages from an era when websites were much easier to lose than to reconstruct.
Albert, in his own 2023 story
The original Full30 article matters because Albert was not being written about from a distance. In the 2023 interview, he explained in his own words how a revolver shooter became the caretaker of one of the oldest surviving sixgun sites.
Before Sixguns
Albert traced his firearms life to childhood trips to a gravel pit with his father, a .22 revolver, an Ithaca .22 rifle and a Sears 12-gauge. His grandfather later gave him a Remington .30-06 and a Winchester 1897 pump. The sixgun obsession came later, around the 1990s, when gun shows were full of used Rugers and Smith & Wessons being traded away and Albert began shooting a steel-plate league. He remembered initially getting beaten by fast autoloader shooters, then learning enough to keep up with — and sometimes beat — them using single- and double-action revolvers.
Finding the old site
As the web became part of everyday life, Albert was reading Elmer Keith, John Taffin, Bill Jordan, Skeeter Skelton and other handgun writers. Sixguns.com became one of the places where those interests converged. What bothered him was its instability: it might disappear for months and then return. During one of those returns he copied the entire site, then spent roughly a year or two tracking down the owner. By Albert's recollection the founding date was close to 1998 — “1998 sounds about right.” He took responsibility for the site in 2009.
The people, not the domain
When asked what the site meant to him, Albert kept returning to names rather than traffic numbers. He spoke about Glen Fryxell's knowledge of cast bullets; Chris Schei struggling with an iPad late in life so he could keep posting stories; the Branding Crew; custom gunsmiths; and the better-known lineage of Taffin, Keith, Skelton, Jordan and McGivern. He said Taffin had sent hundreds of photographs for the site's slide shows as well as articles. The value, in Albert's telling, was that these people had left marks that could still be found.
The Elmer Keith connection
Albert also described the Elmer Keith Memorial Shoot, which he had attended for years before becoming Sixguns caretaker. The gathering combined long-range open-sight handgun shooting, food, raffles, friendship and fundraising. That world explains why an old HTML site was never merely a collection of pages to him; it was attached to living friendships, shoots, arguments, books, guns and people.
When preservation became succession
By 2023 Albert was candid that the site needed modernization without losing its theme and content, and that he was looking for help or a successor. Cash offers for the domain did not interest him when he believed the buyers cared about the name rather than what it contained. The interview became the point where that private problem turned into an explicit succession discussion, then into the handoff recorded in the epilogue.
The original exchange closed simply: “Thanks—Al.” The preservation page keeps the complete Full30 article linked below, but it now carries far more of Albert's own account even if that host eventually disappears.
What he was actually keeping alive
It is easy to reduce an old website to files and domain names. Albert’s own explanation was about people. The restored Branding Crew alone points into work by Chris Schei, Steve Collins, Mike Barranti, Vern Wimmer, David LaPell, Glen Fryxell and many others. Taffin’s archive reaches still farther into the revolver culture surrounding Elmer Keith, Skeeter Skelton, Bill Jordan, Ed McGivern, custom gunsmiths, hunters, handloaders and ordinary correspondents who left something worth reading.
The voice at the center of the historical site: teacher, writer, tester, historian and sixgun authority. Read the memorial.
His stories survive as a separate FrontPage-era collection. Albert’s 2026 archive check is what exposed the old index.htm directory defect we then repaired. Read Chris’s Tales.
Guest writers whose names might otherwise have become little more than broken search results. Enter the Branding Crew.
Galleries, tests, articles, images and links preserved as a working archive rather than a screenshot of a vanished homepage. Enter the legacy site.
Three acts of the same story
The Keeper
Albert takes responsibility for Sixguns.com after first making sure the vulnerable site has been copied. The old pages remain available because someone is willing to maintain them.
The Handoff
The Full30 interview records Albert looking for a successor who values what the domain contains, not merely what the domain might sell for. The article’s epilogue records the transfer of stewardship.
The Restoration
The old HTML archive returns at legacy.sixguns.com. Historical Sixguns URLs are caught at the front door, old images can serve again, search crawling is restored, compromised pages are cleaned and the link graph is tested rather than guessed.
In August 2026 Albert clicked through the newly restored site and found the sort of defect only someone who knew the old place would notice: Chris’s Tales under the Branding Crew did not open correctly.
The stories were not gone. They were sitting in the archive under /crew/Schei/index.htm. The old site used index.htm in that directory while the restored Worker initially expected index.html. Albert’s report led to a class repair: the archive now recognizes both forms, and the Branding Crew link points directly to the proven local page.
There is a pleasing symmetry in that. The man who once rescued Sixguns from disappearing was still helping test the rescue of his rescue.
The two requests
The 2023 Full30 epilogue recorded Albert turning over care of Sixguns with two simple requests: that the Second Amendment Foundation be supported, and that he remain free to contribute if he wished. Both requests belong in the permanent historical record because they say something about the nature of the handoff. This was not a sale of a domain stripped of its meaning. It was stewardship passed forward with obligations attached to the culture around it.
The original tribute ended by directing readers to SAF. That link remains part of this preservation page. Visit SAF membership/support.
He can, and he does. In 2026 Albert remains on the current Sixguns forum as albroswift, helping with the kind of historical detail that cannot be recovered from code alone.
The Voice, the Keeper, the Archive
A memorial archive can accidentally flatten everyone into the same role. Sixguns has a better story than that.
The writer whose articles, tests, history and personality gave Sixguns much of its reason to exist.
The caretaker who saw the old site disappearing, copied it, took responsibility for it, maintained it for years and eventually passed it forward.
The surviving work: imperfect, old-fashioned, historically specific and now deliberately kept reachable from the old URLs that still exist around the web.
The Campfire — Current SixgunsThe living community where the people who remember the old site can still correct the archive, add context and keep the history from becoming static.
The original 2023 tribute
Original title: SIXGUNS.COM – A TRIBUTE
Author: Robert
Published: June 19, 2023
Original host: Full30 Blog
Original discussion: five comments were visible when this preservation pass was made in August 2026.
The original remains worth reading because it preserves Albert speaking for himself about shooting, finding Sixguns, the site’s unstable early years, the people remembered there, the Elmer Keith Memorial Shoot, the problem of modernizing an antique website without destroying it, and his decision to hand responsibility forward.
Read the original Full30 article while it remains available →
Why preserve a tribute to the preserver?
Archives usually celebrate creators. They should also remember maintainers. A writer can leave behind a brilliant body of work and still vanish from the practical web if domains lapse, servers fail, formats rot and nobody is willing to do the unglamorous work of keeping the old paths alive.
Albert Fernandez did that work for Sixguns. The strongest proof is not a certificate or a title. It is that, decades later, we can still open the files.
That was Albert’s short response in the 2023 Full30 discussion when readers thanked him. This page is Sixguns returning the thanks — permanently, on the site he helped save.
How this preservation page was made
This tribute was created in 2026 from the surviving Sixguns archive, the 2023 Full30 interview with Albert, the public metadata still exposed by that article, and the current restoration record. Artificial intelligence assisted with source comparison, chronology, archive inspection and drafting. It was not used to invent quotations, manufacture memories or rewrite Albert’s first-person history as though a machine had witnessed it.
The Full30 article remains linked as the primary 2023 publication. This page retains a substantially fuller account of the interview in newly organized prose, several carefully limited direct phrases from Albert, and three Albert-specific photographs preserved with the tribute, while still linking the original for the complete period presentation as long as it remains online.