Writing about his "Welsh Penny of Hywel Dda, ca. 940 A.D." agaricus65 mentioned that he traced his ancestry to the king who issued the coin. That aspect -- numismatics as family history -- comes up occasionally. Here are two coins from the distaff side of my family: my mother's parents were Hungarian. I have about a dozen or so, half from the Malcontents Revolt of 1703 and the others from the Middle Ages. Not counted are a few more from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The larger coins of the Malcontents Revolt were rolled and are not flat. This little One Poltura is about the size of a 25-cent quarter dollar. The other coin is a modern commemorative, celebrating Sandor Korosi-Csoma. I ran into him while teaching myself to read Tibetan in order to attribute 250 coins for a dealer who was submitting them to an auction house for a client. Korosi-Csoma taught himself philology, walked to Tibet from Europe and wrote the first formal western grammar of their language. Cool enough, but, in addition, in the front of his book, he identified himself as a "Siculo-Magyar" and I could really relate to that.
From the other side of the family come these two from the ancient town of Panormos, now known as Palermo. Panormos had been a Greek town originally before falling under the sway of Carthage. (In Greek, "Pan ormos" means "all ready." The town was at first just a safe harbor for outfitting and repairing ships. We see the root word in "hormone" which is a pre-cursor chemical that "makes ready" some other action.) This coin is not from my collection. I have owned coins of Panormos, but hold none now. They tend to be small and unexciting. These are larger, and in fact, have Punic, not Greek letters.
