I have a question about key dates. I am looking at the data in red book about production. How do I know what the key dates are for Lincolns? I know that they are the lower production, but the S mints are always lower does that make them key date or am I just way off base with this??
The Lincoln keys are relatively straight forward: 1909-S 1909-S VDB 1914-D 1922 No D the semi-keys are more numerous, but the 31-S is the big kahuna of the semi-keys. personally, I would "key in" (sorry for the pun) on coins minted before 1930 and especially prior to 1920. hope that helps, Noodle
There is no definitive answer to this. Circulated, Mike is probably right (1955 D/D?). Uncirculated, the 09-S (and maybe the 09-S VDB) drop off, and 1923-S, 1924-S, 1925-S, and 1926-S (and 1924-D?) become very hard to find and even harder if you want any red on them. If you are looking for the best set out there, then you get such rarities as 1919-, 1911-D, 1935-D, etc. where there is only one each of the top pops. After that, you can complicate it further depending on which variety you include. 1955- D/D?, 1958- D/D? etc.
Caser. I hope this will be of some help for you good luck.http://www.lincolncentresource.com/keydates.html Bruce.
For key and semi-key date/mm combos looks at catalog value, not mintage. Often in the older silver coins you can find coins with high mintages, but also high catalog value. Doesn't seem to make sense until you get into the history of US coins. There were a huge number of Morgans melted sometime in the 1800's. That made some mintage figures useless. Strike 20,000,000 coins and melt 19,750,000 of them, and you've created a scarcer coin.
