Can anyone tell me the time and date of this pocketwatch?
My dad was given a golden looking brass pocketwatch by his great uncle. It has the name elgin inside on the face and the face seems to made out of a white mother of pearl or is just a pearl looking color. I know that there is a pocketwatch company called elgins but when i looked this watch was not in their archive. I cannot open the back and it also does not have a door thingy. I dont know the code so maybe thats why i cant find it on the website. I also know that there is a jewlery store called elgins in Baton Rouge but i dont know very much about it. please help and please no rude comments. Thanks!
Elgin was a watch company that existed from the end of the civil war into the sixties, when the factory in Elgin, Illinois was closed. over the period of their existence, they made over 60 million watches. They are pretty good quality watches, and since they are so common, they are easy to find parts for. Ever since the original American company shut down, Elgins have been made under an outsourced manufacturer. Any new Elgin watches that you may find aren’t the same type of Elgin as your pocket watch.
If you can manage to find the serial number of the watch, you can quite easily find out a lot about it, like the manufacture date, and details about the case and movement.
There are two different serial numbers, the case serial, and the movement serial, as the case and movement were made by two different companies. You will need the movement serial. This will be on the actual movement itself, inside the watch.
here are some instructions on how to open your case:
http://elgintime.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-open-pocketwatch-case.html
once you have found the correct way to open the case and successfully managed to,
go to this site:
http://www.trusted-forwarder.org/elgin/databases/elgin_sn_intro.html
and use the serial number off the movement from your Elgin. If you watch has a valid serial # (which it should), the site will list all the known details of your watch’s serial #. This should be very insightful into the details of your pocket watch, and is probably the only realistic way to date the watch.
be gentle with it 
hope that helps!