Gift of Foreign Coins

I recently became interested in Foreign coins and have been categorizing them by country in 2 x 2 holders and placing them in plastic pages in 3-ring binders. While visiting my Mom in Houston, her very sweet neighbor Nancy came over to bring us homemade bread and drink a cup of coffee. We talked about several things and somehow my foreign collection came up and I showed her my binders which I brought with me as I have a couple hundred coins which I still need to go through.

Her and her husband Peter had visited many countries and recognized some of the coins in my collection. She left and came back with a cigar box full of coins, some loose and some sorted in envelopes by country. She said, “Enjoy them, our kids aren’t interested in coins!” After many protests on my part to no avail, I finally accepted them gratefully and told her I would add them to my binders. Between the loose and the ones in envelopes, I estimate there are about 200 coins! A quick glance at most of them did not reveal any silver coins as most have dates from the 1960’s and forward. I will have fun going through them, nonetheless, making my collection even better! The really odd thing about my foreign collection is that, with very few exceptions, all were given to me.

 

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I see some East Germany coins there. Norway, Japan, France, West Germany, Mexico...

Get a Standard Catalog of World Coins (Krause Publications) and look up values. Perhaps sell them in small lots and use the proceeds to buy higher-grade examples of the coins you like?

 

Thanks for the suggested catalog. I’ve been using Numista.com to help with categorizing my coins and always look for and note varieties. Plus I write the metallurgy on the 2x2 so my kids will at least know which ones are silver! I keep the oldest and best of each variety, but keep all coins from Ireland and Venezuela. I was born in Venezuela (Texan father and Venezuelan mother) and I am also a 4th generation Irish American. These recent years, I claim the Irish ancestry more than the Venezuelan, especially after the wife and I traveled to Ireland last year. I love the Emerald Isle and rave about it so much, my mother says I’m turning Irish, lol! ☘️

 

I have a very intricate, organized system for keeping all my foreign coins. I put them in a cookie can I've had for about 30 years. There are well over 1,000 coins in there now. One day someone might have some fun going through them to see what they can find...

 

Nice assortment of coins to start off with. I collect world coins, but I collect by country, ruler within the country (if they made their own coins), and by coinage type (i.e. Hammered, Milled, Decimal, Reform, etc.). I currently have 3,156 countries, but over 15,000 actual coins. Those that aren't in slabs, or oversize, are kept in 2x2s, which are stored in 2x2 storage boxes.

 

Hey, that’s basically what I am doing with other people’s stashes of foreign coins, lol. A couple of years ago, my boss got me hooked on foreign coins as he has been to many different countries. We swapped a few of my duplicates for many of his many duplicates. He also gave me a lot of foreign bills which I need to figure out what to do with. I’m going to call him and trade some more coins with him, should be fun. He’s a worse nut about coins than I am!

 

This is the type of 'cache' that young numismatists love - see if there is a coin club for YNs in your area & consider donating them - sounds like a win/win

 

My father left me a small stash of foreign coins from the WWII era. He was in the U.S. Navy serving as a corpsman. He travelled to several countries from Europe to Australia. I also had my own collection of coins from South America, specifically, Uruguay. I was able to get my father's collection out of the house before our divorce, but the ones from South America disappeared. I did salvage some 10 Peso bills from Uruguay. I have 10 bills from their 1939 release that are in serial number sequential order. I put them in my journal and they are protected in currency shields or whatever they call them. I mistakenly secured them in my journal with Scotch tape which left marks on the top bill. Is there something like NGC for paper money that I can get them graded and is there anyway of removing the tape marks without damaging the bill?

 

I'm doing the same thing and just finished my United Kingdom coins today. I found I had a couple of silver coins with one being a 1921 Six Pence Australia that is .925 silver. Like you, all but a very few were given to me. I've found 41 coins in silver and more to go through.

 

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Same here. My dad had a small plastic box on his bedroom dresser filled with coins and currency he brought back from the South Pacific in WWII, and his brother brought back from Europe.

From the time I was old enough to read, I'd sit for hours with those coins and bills and our family's set of encyclopedias (remember those?), reading about the countries that money came from.

I think that's why I'm still first and foremost a world coin collector. I don't think I even knew about US coins until a few years later when an older cousin showed me his Whitman cent, nickel and dime folders.

Yes re paper money grading. Ask the guys on the paper money sub-forum. They might be able to answer your tape question too.

 

Yes, had a mini-hoard from Dad, and purchased a lot on eBay:
615 Different coins from 101 countries with 464 Different types all at a low cost!

 

I get more fun out of my world coins that cost me very little than I do from the rare, precious metal coins that I pay hundreds of dollars for. I keep them all organized in spread sheets on computer (with 4 separate backups), also have pix all organized in folders, stored in 4 separate places. Plenty of backup! Hard drives and thumb drives do fail eventually. The cloud storage makes it easy to access from remote with my phone.

 

As a memory of your father, I'm sure those are valuable. But in terms of resale, they have a catalog value of $3 in UNC shape, and that's a retail number. So they're not worth the money to have graded or any repairs attempted. I doubt anything could be done for the tape other than possibly lightening it up a bit.

 

Can I be adopted!? LOL
That will be an exciting search someday. I would love to see it filmed and put on youtube.

 

I will gladly accept free coins no matter the rarity!

 

I took a picture of my old cookie can. Just thought I'd show it off since I commented about it. Not the best pic, but I'm not asking for grades or values or anything. As you can see, I've thrown some tokens in, as well as some old Mardi Gras beads. I have no recollection of where the beads came from, though. The last time I counted these coins, there were just over 1,000 in the can. That was several years ago, though.

 

Mardi Gras beads are kind of like the 1960s. If you can remember them, you probably weren't there.

 

When are you going to put all those in 2x2s?

 

Except they sometimes show up elsewhere. Every year I participate in a Mardi Gras themed run in California (yeah, CA not LA ...), and people, including some runners, wear fancy costumes and lots of those beads. I took a few medals, and lots of those beads, back home ...

Christian