How did you get started?

I got started around 7 months ago. When my grandpa passed, my mom called me up and said that she had some old dimes, half dollars, and dollars that he had collected for no apparent reason. All it was were 9 silver Roosevelt dimes, 2 Kennedy halves, and 4 Eisenhower dollars. And I told her that I would give them a good home in memory of him. Now here I am 7 months later with 200+ coins ranging from pennies to pieces of eight!


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I had been intrigued by older US coins like wheats and buffalo nickels as a kid and picked them out of my or my parents' pocket change whenever I found them, but I only seriously decide to start collecting at 15 (in 2007), still with collecting from circulation , but now fueled with a strong drive to collect, with small purchases here and there as time went on. In 2011 (this month will be three years exact), I attended my first coin show. Bought me my US coins and saw that a dealer was selling ancients but mostly medieval (mainly Byzantines and Chinese IIRC). I became fascinated in potentially owning something thousands of years old. All of his stock was out of my price range so I kindly asked the dealer if any one else was selling ancients. I was directed to a friendly dealer from whom I bought my first two ancients:





The rest is (no pun intended) history and I now only collect ancient and medieval coinage that interests me.

 

Have this same folder and almost filled up three more coins to go! P.S. most i found but a few were given to me

 

I got started when i found a 1924 lincoln cent sitting on the ground in third grade about 5 years ago have almost 1,000 coins now!

 

With all these youngsters around, I sure do feel old. In fact, there was this old fool looking at me through my mirror this morning......

 

I've tried to give foreign coins to some kids, but few showed little interest. I know the boy scouts has a merit badge for coin collecting and these kids were scouts! Do you know of any websites that I can go to get last century coins from specific countries?

My first coins were German--I was stationed in West Berlin when the wall went up--since than I have traveled to 44 different countries. I probably have 4 to 5,000 coins--mostly from Europe, Africa, South America and Caribe.

 

I got started 10 years ago this month. My Grandfather had passed a few years before, and his eldest son, my uncle, called all of us kids and grandkids together to "see what was in Opa's old safe in the basement." Although in retrospect, I think he had a pretty good idea.

Anyhow we all got together, my uncle opened up the old wall safe, and in it were literally thousands of coins. Gramps had accumulated a lot of junk silver, but there were also gold coins, Morgan Dollars, Peace Dollars and all kinds of crazy stuff including a couple of 100lb bags of junk silver.

We split all the coins up into lots and each took home a small hoard. It was digging through the junk silver that actually got me hooked. I started out just by seeing how many date/mint marks I could pick out of the junk silver piles. Eventually I picked up a couple of Whitman folders and filled them up. I was able to assemble a complete set of heavily circulated Washington quarters, minus the 1932D and 1932S. I went to a coin shop and was told that these are what is known as "Key Dates." It wasn't long before those two empty holes in my Whitman folder were bugging me...I went back to the coin shop to see what the dealer was asking for those two key dates...I was bit by the bug, and I've really never looked back. I collected all of the classic 19th and 20th Century series, from Morgan Dollars to Indian Head Cents to Standing Liberty Quarters.

Within the last year I've shifted my focus from US coins to Ancients. I'm focusing on Roman Imperial coinage and having a blast! The stories those coins could tell if they could speak. There's something for everyone in this hobby.

 

How did you get started ?
About early May 1956 when my parents....................

In 1961 when I was aged 4 a friend of the family, a merchant captain who had sailed the 7 seas for decades, dropped off a sack of coins from all 4 corners of the globe at my home as a gift for me to play with.
That is when I became fascinated with geography and history and began to accumulate coins from every source possible at such a young age.

The following year in 1962 I was on holiday in Spain, (parents included), the hotel had guests from Germany, France, Italy, Holland and the USA,

In the courtyard of the hotel was a very shallow wishing well in which lower denomination coins consisting of Cents, Pfennigs, Lire,Pesetas, Centimos and Pennies, etc etc, were tossed into the water on a daily basis.

In an effort to protect the Goldfish in the well from metal poisoning I scooped out all the coins every day for 3 weeks.

The fish survived, I became an avid collector and accumulated a collection that is the envy of the world to this day.

No plastic, no slabs, no Cac, no TPG

 

When I was eight, my parents divorced and my mother had to work leaving me alone more than today would be considered appropriate. I had a lot of time to kill in the apartment. I developed an interest in collecting US coins by date and my mother helped greatly by lending me $50 so I could buy a bag of 5000 loose cents from a vending machine company nearby at face value. I would go through the bags keeping the few I'd want and rolling the rest so the bank would take them. I had to pay my mother for the 20 or 200 I'd keep but she never asked for interest on the $50 I'd tie up for the week or so it would take me to process a bag. Occasionally I'd get a bag of other denominations but it really hurt to put aside a half dollar so my set of those was never very extensive. Vending coins were great sources since kids in that time would steal coins from their dad's collection and use them to buy gum or pop. I found some nice coins.

I always thought it was foolish to pay more than face value for a US coin but my searching turned up duplicates of some which I'd trade at a local shop for ones I lacked. For some reason I could pay 25 S mint cents from the teens for a nice quarter ignoring the fact that I could have sold them for more. In 9th grade I took Latin in school and noticed the coin shop had a dish of cheap Romans (50 cents for bronzes and $2 for silver). I started trading duplicates for ancients and soon lost interest in US coins altogether to the point I stopped searching those bags. My mother thought I was making a mistake when I wanted to sell my US to but ancients so she bought my coins for face value and started putting away all the silver halves she got in change (it was 1964 and she heard that the silver coins would be worth something someday). When she died, I got them back.

Now it is 50 year later and I still think it is silly to pay over face but perfectly OK to buy an ancient for hundreds. Along the way I had some tough times so I sold most of the ancients from the early days but still have three I had in 1963 when I took a photo of some coins including them. Because of my mother's intervention, I still have some of those early finds. Some I remember finding. Even in the late 1950's it was special to find a seated Liberty dime or three. I wish I had not sold those first ancients and wonder to this day where some of them ended up.

The story of my life in coins just has one chapter to go. My daughter says she wants to keep my Greek minor silver (fractional obols and smaller). I live in hope my only grandson will decide that the rest of them are interesting but so far it looks like they all may be up for grabs when I'm finished. It is hard to have a hobby when everyone else in the family sees it as just evidence of my being a bit strange.

 

well, i enjoyed reading all these...great post and welcome ibraaheem.

only started collecting in late 2011, i'm currently 42. i went to the indianapolis museum of art that summer and saw an exhibit on on roman funerary sculptures, amongst all sorts of other cool art both new and old (bc-to current). but some of the roman pieces where large...and i could touch them. neat!

sometime later i came across some roman coins on ebay. hey, these things aren't that expensive. wow. i'll buy one..then i can touch that roman art all i want! picked this up for ten bucks (picked up another couple also, one i gave to my father, one was traded to a coin bud..it was one he really wanted). anyway, this was my first coin..



i think if i would have got that coin in the days before the internet, that may have been it. but i found some other folks on coin forums..sharing and seeing other peoples coin really boosted my interested...and i've been hooked since. ancients have branched into me dabbling with other coin types, i have a little bit of everything.

i still like to touch my coins...

 

What was it got me started? The old man had made a discovery on a lot of proof sets he'd purchased in 1960. Small date cents. All the rage. Still have the set and the legacy.........

He provided the impetus but I provided the sustainability. Would he be proud of me? Probably not. Hard task manager and into his own things. Still, he provided me with a hobby that I'm truly thankful for. For that I shall be forever grateful......

 

Ha ha, I still have some of my old folders, too! I think this one dates from 1969. You can see how my handwriting changed between 1970 and 1972

 

Its ok i feel like I'm old even though I'm only 13

 

Great stories........some very heartfelt and touching, thanks guys.

I have a small collection which is growing.........no specific theme, although mainly ancient, with some Morgans and old UK amongst them.

It all started with this forum really.......I see so many nice coins, I usually try and find one for my collection after reading a good thread. Unless its Ancient Joes thread that it!
My first Roman coin I ever held was a small late Roman bronze I found with my metal detector...it was a Gloria exercitus soldiers and standards of Constantine II.....three days after finding it, I had recovered nearly 2000 more from a 10 yard square area in that field and finding the hoard is probably what I remember most fondly from the past 5 years and undoubtedly the reason why I am here on this forum. I try to sell enough coins to give me a free coin or two and some pocket money.......that way my collection is sort of free, if you discount the time it takes to sell.

 

Well, I have a similar tale of a young lad being baby-sitted (baby-sat?) by his wonderful Grandmother (Granny, RIP) ... she collected Canadian and English and/or any coins when she "went abroad" and travelled (she was very cool and lived to be "96" years old!!)

She started me on my Canadian One Cent collection (I used the same folder, until just last year, when sadly, they stopped minting Canadian pennies ... how sad, eh? ... very sad ... end of a lifetime's routine, where I'd find a wonderful "almost uncirculated" penny and plug it into my wonderful ol' shelf-worn album!!)

... anyway ...

I was born in 1963, so by the time that the 1967-Bicentennial rolled-around, I was in Granny's wheelhouse (I was 4 years old) and she absolutely "loved" the animal-coins from 1967!!

Hmmm, obviously that's where I get my animal-coin obsession!! (I'm merely carrying-on the tradition!!)

anyway ... I ended-up buying a sweet set of proof 1967 coins ...

Yup, I'm sure that Granny would have loved these babies!! (RIP, Granny)

 

Really nice writeup sir. I am younger but also hoping that my sons when they grow up develop a love for coins. My coins don't mean anything in terms of value to me, I love them more than I love money. All I want is to be able to pass them along to my children, if they want them.

 

No big story here. I found a dime with the date 1964 that seemed odd. Looked it up and found out it was 90% silver. I heard about silver, but never knew it was in our coins. My mind has a thirst for knowledge, and it took off from there.

 

When I read posts in these forums, I sometimes skim through, just for sake of time (so much content!). I have to say I read each and every post in this thread. And there is a common theme in nearly all of them...passion. Not one person said "I'm just in it for the profit". Which is a rare thing in this world indeed.

Thanks for sharing your stories, it is very inspiring, especially as I think of my own two boys (currently ages 6 and 8). Hope they find a hobby that calls to them in the same way.