Hermannr said:
Do your homework and you will be fine. Don't take your prize to NY City! It is legal for you to bring it home without an FFL transfer if it part of an inheritance.
Please do NOT sell it. You
can own it legally in upstate NY, but you do have to jump through some hoops that do not apply in most other states. It is part of your family's history, so IMHO that should be preserved and handed on.
Which brings us to the suggestion about "inheritance." It is correct that a firearm received as a bequest is about the ONLY exception to the requirement that all interstate transfers of handguns must go through an FFL. The technical issue is that, to be yours through bequest, the firearm must be specifically bequeathed to you in your father's will. For example, if he left everything to your mother and SHE decided she doesn't like guns so she'd pass it along to you -- then YOU would not be receiving the gun as a bequest, YOU would be receiving it as a transfer from another living person -- just the same as if you bought it from a total stranger.
If the gun wasn't mentioned in the will at all, then it would be considered part of your father's "residuary estate" (which, in ordinary peoplespeak, means "everything else that I didn't specifically mention"). If the gun is part of the residuary estate, and you are a named heir to a share of the residuary estate, you can
probably be deemed to have inherited the gun. I would want to confirm that with an attorney. The key point is that, if there's no way under the will to construe that the gun was bequeathed to you -- you cannot claim you received it as an inheritance.
All this may be moot anyway, because you live in NY state. I suspect that NY makes you jump through hoops to bring in a firearm even if you received it as an inheritance, so do your homework.
It's a fascinating pistol. Whatever is required to bring it home, it's worth the effort.