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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Mystery, post: 139848, member: 5891&quot;]I&#039;d like to start by saying that I&#039;ve never been a coin collecter, other than the &quot;toss an odd foreign coin in a drawer&quot; type.&nbsp; I&#039;ve never really come across many foreign coins, other than the Canadian stuff, in my day to day life.&nbsp; I&#039;m cleaning out closets at my parents&#039; house in preparation for a move, going through all of the toys I had as a child and such, and I came across a box of coins that has been in the back of a closet, untouched, since the late 1980s when my parents put it there.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I started looking through the box, and while I know how some of the coins got here, some are mysteries.&nbsp; My family isn&#039;t close and I don&#039;t know very much specific family history although I know general information about most of my family and can more or less place them at any given time in history, so my interest is more to that end.&nbsp; I will say that my family are not world travelers, nor do they know any, so that they&#039;d have this many foreign coins seems odd to me.&nbsp; To give you an idea, one side of my family are Alabama farmers and lived in rural Alabama their entire lives, and the other side is from Europe but have been mining coal in Pennsylvania for most of the last century. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A few of these coins are in cardboard sleeves, which indicates that someone in the family was a collector, but most of them are loose.&nbsp; I suspect that coins were added to the box by different people throughout the decades.&nbsp; I don&#039;t know of any family member that was a rabid coin collector and I doubt anyone was too seriously into it as I don&#039;t think any of these are very valuable.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Here is a list of the mystery coins (or as best as I can do).&nbsp; If anyone can tell me how common they were or if you can point me to a guide, I&#039;d appreciate it.&nbsp; I don&#039;t really care about prices since I&#039;m not selling any, but how common these would be for the average American to come across in the time period between, say 1930 and 1985.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>I suspect these came from various grandfathers and their brothers who fought in the big war.&nbsp; I can&#039;t place any single family member to all of these countries, but I think they are contributions from several different family members who I know were in the general area during the time period.&nbsp; Among all of them, they could have acquired all of these coins.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A French Franc from 1943</p><p>A couple of Irish coins from 1940</p><p>A UK penny dated 1940</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A Danzig Free State Pfennig dated 1932</p><p>Austrian coin dated 1933</p><p>A bunch of Spanish coins with Franco&#039;s portrait on them and a Spanish coin dated 1944</p><p>Netherlands coins dated 1940-1943</p><p>Various coins with portraits of Hitler on them</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>As far as I know, no member of my family has ever been to an Eastern Bloc country, and while these may be common now, I don&#039;t think they were before 1989 (which was the last time the box was touched):</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Yugoslavian coins dated in the early 1950s</p><p>Czechoslovakian coins dated in the early 1960s and late 1950s</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>No one in my family has ever been to Africa or India, although since there are only a couple of these, they could have come from anywhere:</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>A Cuban coin dated 1920</p><p>Indian coins dated 1956 and 1957</p><p>A half-cent from Sierra Leone dated 1964</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>No one in my family has ever been to the Middle East:</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Kuwaiti coins, date unreadable by me</p><p>A couple of what look to be Israeli coins</p><p>A coin from The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The biggest mystery is the origin of the Eastern Bloc coins and the Middle Eastern coins.&nbsp; No one I know of has ever traveled to either of those regions, but from the number of coins I have, these were fairly substantial trips.&nbsp; Also, I&#039;m not sure how many people traveled to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia at all during that time frame.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Thanks for any help or pointers to any guides that you can give me.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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